Centaurus

Large, bright constellation of the southern hemisphere, represented as a centaur. Its brightest star, Alpha Centauri, is a triple star, and contains the closest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri, which is only 4.2 light years away from the Sun, and 0.1 light years closer than its companions, Alpha Centauri A and B. Omega Centauri, which is just visible to the naked eye as a hazy patch, is the largest and brightest globular cluster of stars in the sky, 16,000 light years away from the Sun.

Alpha and Beta Centauri are both of the first magnitude and, like Alpha and Beta Ursae Majoris, are known as ‘the Pointers’, as a line joining them leads to Crux.

A ‘planetary nursery’ in a cloudy ring around a star in Centaurus was discovered by astronomers in Hawaii and Chile in 1998. The ring, with a diameter of 18.6 billion miles, seems to be forming a solar system with planets. It is expected to give astronomers valuable information about how our own solar system was formed.