Talk:S Coronae Borealis

A fact from S Coronae Borealis appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 14 August 2017 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the star S Coronae Borealis has been estimated as having around 1.34 times the Sun's mass but 308 times its radius?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2017/August. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/S Coronae Borealis.

Wikipedia

Distance in article

@Lithopsian: we need some sort of distance in the prose, I had added this, but if you think something else please add alternative. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 23:45, 4 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry. I can only guess that there was an edit conflict of some sort. I was just taking out the excess of irrelevant authors from a citation. Lithopsian (talk) 13:51, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Ah ok, no problem. Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 14:45, 6 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Takeuti paper, or imprecise precision

I really wonder about the paper by Takeuti et al. used as the main citation for distance, luminosity, etc. It is nonsensical to give a bolometric luminosity accurate to 4 significant figures and mass and radius accurate to 3, given a 5% error bar on the parallax and therefore distance. Whose mistake is this, the transcriber's or the original paper's? -- Bill-on-the-Hill (talk) 17:47, 14 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]

You could read the paper and find out easily enough, I'd imagine? Anyway, why is it nonsensical? Derived values are often quoted to more significant figures than the error margin. Otherwise everything in astrophysics would have to be rounded to the first significant digit and any sort of largescale analysis would suffer from horrible binning problems and potentially systematic biases. With correct attention to the statistics involved, there is no conflict. The Wikipedia page doesn't quote the margin of error in the luminosity, but it is around +15% in this case, from "known" factors. Given that other (admittedly older) published papers give luminosities far outside this range, there are likely to be "unknowns" also but that is always implicit in astrophysics. Lithopsian (talk) 19:40, 14 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]