The Stellar Research Project Pollux By: Mary Montgomery

What are the differences between them? What does the “k” stand for? The “k” stands for “Kelvin” which is a unit of measure to measure temperatures. Pollux The Sun Temperature Around 4770k Around 5800k Color/s Orangish/yellow Orange/yellow/red Size Pollux is actually 10 times the diameter of the sun, making it a little less than 8 million miles across, and not quite twice the solar mass The actual diameter is about 1 million milies- over 100 times earth’s diameter and has a mass of 2 x 1020 (times the power of twenty) How far away is Pollux from the sun? Pollux is about 34 light years away from our sun.

Pollux is actually part of the constellation Gemini, the sign of the twins Pollux and its other near by star, Castor can be seen easily at night because the smaller stars of the constellation are smaller and less bright. You can only tell pollux from castor because pollux has a slight yellow tint and shines brighter and castor has a slight blue tint.

What is behind the myth of the Gemini? The Myth of the Gemini says that The twins, Pollux and Castor ( two of the stars)had the same mother but different fathers so Pollux was immortal and Castor was mortal. Once Castor had died Pollux asked his father, Zeus if he could share his immortality with Castor which had transformed them into the Gemini constellation as the myth says. But there where many stories so I added another one that sounds some-what alike Castor was killed in battle and Pollux could not bear to live without him and begged Zeus to let him die, too. Zeus could not grant the gift quite as asked, but decreed that Pollux would spend every other day in Olympus with the gods, and the rest of the time in the underworld with his brother. To honor this devotion, Zeus placed their constellation in the sky as a remembrance. What is behind the myth of the Gemini?

Here’s Pollux on the H-R diagram What is an H-R diagram? The H-R diagram really stands for the Hertzspurng- Russell diagram which was actually invented by them. The diagram shows the relationship between the surface temperature and the absolute brightness of stars ( which are the white circles on the diagram.)

Pollux’s life Pollux was born from a nebula like every other star. Pollux’s mass is almost 2x our Sun’s. I believe Pollux’s is about at it’s middle life stage, probly starting to become a Supergiant or even starting to get closer to the stage of a Supernova because the bigger mass of a star the shorter it’s life. I think that once pollux becomes a supernova it will become a neutron star or a black hole. The picture in the background is actually a picture of a star exploding into a supernova that happened January 9, 2008. Several ground-based telescopes were able to view the star’s explosion, which had an outburst 100 billion times brighter than Earth’s sun. The star was 10 million years old, approximately the same size as our sun, but about 10-20 times denser

Resources http://www.earthsky.org/tonightpost/brightest-stars/pollux-not-castor-is-geminis-brightest-star - found lots of the info on this site. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castor_and_Pollux#Origins – where I found a lot of info on the gemini and it’s myths. http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en – where I found most of my pictures. http://m.www.yahoo.com/ - the search engine I used for most of the time.