AS 314, also known as V452 Scuti, is a white hypergiant star and luminous blue variable candidate located in the constellation of Scutum. It has an apparent magnitude of 9.85 and can be seen with small telescopes.
Characteristics
AS 314 was poorly studied until the year 2000, when Miroshnichenko et al. determined a distance for this star of around 10 kiloparsecs (32,600 light years), a luminosity 160,000 times that of Sun (L☉), a radius 200 times the solar radius (R☉), and an initial mass of 20 solar masses (M☉). It's losing 2 × 10−5 M☉ each year (in other words, 1 M☉ every 50,000 years) through a very strong stellar wind.
It has an infrared excess, suggesting that it's shrouded in a circumstellar envelope of dust, which perhaps produced outbursts in the past as a luminous blue variable, because its location in the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram places it near the zone occupied by those stars; however, it has not been classified as a bona fide luminous blue variable, but as a candidate.
The Hipparcos parallax and proper motions are large and imply a much closer, and hence less luminous, star.