As we are studying stars and specifically the interstellar medium at the moment, I chose this image of the runaway star Alpha Cam that is apart of the constellation Camelopardalis (the giraffe) that appears in fall skies and has appeared on our constellation quizzes often while accidentally following several APOD links. The term runaway as applied to stars refers to those that are traveling at an extremely high speed through space and therefore the interstellar material between celestial objects, which is actually not completely devoid of matter as many people assume, but rather is made up of a low density composition of 99% gas to 1% dust. Alpha Cam has been classified as a bright white-blue type O star, but has a relatively dim apparent magnitude of about 5 because it is far away from Earth and is blocked by this interstellar dust that surrounds it. In comparison to our Sun, Alpha Cam is extremely bright and has the luminosity of 530,000 Suns and a mass 25 to 30 times greater than the Sun. Scientists have hypothesized that this star will explode relatively soon, since it is a massive super giant, and is quickly losing a significant amount of mass (at a rate of six millionths of a solar mass per year). Alpha Cam moves at the unfathomable speed of 60 kilometers a second and as it moves it compresses the interstellar material that it passes, which means it was likely originally apart of a binary system and was propelled by the force of a super nova explosion of the other star.
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