Supermassive Black Hole A Star

Author notes

Ep. 35, Page 63

smbhax

on Jan. 11, 2019

Here's an ink (and wash) sketch I got to send to a reader for their support of the comic through my Patreon campaign! : )



Thanks everyone for your support! You make this comic possible! : D

I'm not sure what inspired me to give Selenis a canina companion there, but did you know that Sirius, 8.6 light years from Earth, is also known as the "Dog Star"? The nickname comes from its membership in the constellation Canis Major ("Greater Dog").

Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky, and its proper name means "glowing" or "scorching" in Greek. You could be forgiven for not noticing Sirius is actually a *binary* star, because its companion, Sirius B, while one of the most massive white dwarf stars known—twice as massive as most, and about the same mass as our Sun, packed into a sphere about the same size as Earth—has only about 5% of our Sun's solar luminosity, while Sirius A, the main star, is 25 times as bright as the Sun! Here they both are (B is below and to the left of A) in a 2003 Hubble image:


image by NASA, ESA, H. Bond (STScI), and M. Barstow (University of Leicester) (source)

(If part of this about Sirius' A and B sounds familiar, you might remember it from a long post I made about our local area of space back in 2011!)