The 70-day absence symbolised Osiris and his wife’s passing through the Egyptian underworld, the Duat. The flooding of the Nile brought fertility to the land when the star appeared, and Egyptians associated the goddess with both the inundation, fertility and the new year. They called Sirius the Nile Star. An X-ray image of the Sirius star system located 8.6 light years from Earth. This image shows two sources and a spike-like pattern due to the support structure for the transmission grating. The bright source is Sirius B, a white dwarf star that has a surface temperature of about 25,000 degrees Celsius which produces very low energy X-rays. The dim source at the position of Sirius A – a normal star more than twice as massive as the Sun – may be due to ultraviolet radiation from Sirius A leaking through the filter on the detector. In contrast, Sirius A is the brightest star in the northern sky when viewed with an optical telescope, while Sirius B is 10,000 times dimmer. Because the two stars are so close together Sirius B escaped detection until 1862 when Alvan Clark discovered it while testing one of the best optical telescopes in the world at that time. Image: NASA/SAO/CXC Kaler, James B. "Omicron-2 Canis Majoris". Stars. University of Illinois . Retrieved 24 February 2014.

The diameter of the primary star, Sirius A, was first measured by Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Q. Twiss at Jodrell Bank in 1959. The primary component, Sirius A, is roughly twice as massive as the Sun and 25 times more luminous. It has an estimated surface temperature of 9,940 K.

The Romans celebrated the heliacal setting of Sirius around 25April, sacrificing a dog, along with incense, wine, and a sheep, to the goddess Robigo so that the star's emanations would not cause wheat rust on wheat crops that year. [33] New Regency, Smith and Cliff Roberts ( Emancipation, The Midnight Sky) will produce. Heller, Lily Brooks-Dalton and Brandon Scott Smith will be executive producers. They are already talking to a big star. Leave it to Peter Heller to imagine a postapocalyptic world that contains as much loveliness as it does devastation. His hero, Hig, flies a 1956 Cessna (his dog as copilot) around what was once Colorado, chasing all the same things we chase in these pre-annihilation days: love, friendship, the solace of the natural world, and the chance to perform some small kindness. The Dog Stars is a wholly compelling and deeply engaging debut.”
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The Hipparcos parallax for Sirius is only accurate to about ±0.04 light years, giving a distance of 8.6light years. [9] SiriusB is generally assumed to be at the same distance. SiriusB has a Gaia Data Release 3 parallax with a much smaller statistical margin of error, giving a distance of 8.709 ±0.005light years, but it is flagged as having a very large value for astrometric excess noise, which indicates that the parallax value may be unreliable. [11] Discovery of Sirius B [ edit ] Hubble Space Telescope image of SiriusA and SiriusB. The white dwarf can be seen to the lower left. The diffraction spikes and concentric rings are instrumental effects.

Heller’s voice is extraordinary and his narrator’s toughness seems to hide a beautiful and aching restlessness. One of those books that makes you happy for literature.”