https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulpecula wrote:
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<<Vulpecula is a faint constellation in the northern sky. Its name is Latin for "little
Fox", although it is commonly known simply as the
Fox. The
Dumbbell Nebula (M27), is a large planetary nebula which was discovered by the French astronomer Charles Messier in 1764 as the very first object of its kind. It can be seen with good binoculars in a dark sky location, appearing as a dim disk 6 arcminutes in diameter.
There are
no stars brighter than 4th magnitude in the
Fox. The brightest star is Alpha Vulpeculae, a magnitude 4.44m red giant at a distance of 297 light-years. The star is an optical binary that carries the traditional name Anser, which refers to the goose the little fox holds in its jaws. Anser has been analysed as a member of the Arcturus stream, a group of stars with high (im)proper motion &
mettle-poor properties thought to be the remnants of a small galaxy consumed by the Milky Way.
In 1967, the first pulsar, PSR B1919+21, was discovered in Vulpecula by Jocelyn Bell, supervised by Antony Hewish, in Cambridge. While they were searching for scintillation of radio signals of quasars, they observed pulses which repeated with a period of 1.3373 seconds. Fifteen years after the first pulsar was discovered, the first millisecond pulsar, PSR B1937+21, was also discovered in Vulpecula, only a few degrees in the sky away from PSR B1919+21.
Vulpecula is also home to HD 189733 b, one of the closest extrasolar planets currently being studied by the Spitzer Space Telescope. On 12 July 2007 the Financial Times (London) reported that the chemical signature of water vapour was detected in the atmosphere of this planet. However. HD 189733b with atmospheric temperatures rising above 1,000°C it is far from being habitable.
NGC 7052 is an elliptical galaxy in Vulpecula at a distance of 214 million light-years from Earth. It has a central dusty disk with a diameter of 3700 light-years; there is a
supermassive black hole with a
mass of 300 million solar masses in its nucleus. Jets can be seen emanating from the galaxy, and it has very strong radio emissions. Astronomers surmise that the disk is the remnant of a smaller galaxy that merged with NGC 7052.
The eastern part of Vulpecula is occupied by the
Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall. It is a galaxy filament, with the length of 3,000 megaparsecs, making it the largest structure in the universe.>>