Stars · 30
The stars people ask about
The bright stars with names and histories — what kind of star each one is, how far its light has come, the stories cultures told about it, and whether it is above your horizon tonight.
Fainter, but each with something of its own: a double, a variable, a former pole star.
- Sirius The brightest star in the night sky, and one of the nearest. Its name is Greek for “scorching”.
- Canopus The second-brightest star of the night, a giant that outshines the Sun ten thousand times over. Spacecraft steer by it.
- Rigil Kentaurus The nearest star you can see with the naked eye — a pair of Sun-like stars 4.4 light-years away, with a tiny red third, Proxima, nearer still.
- Arcturus The brightest star in the northern sky: an orange giant, older than the Sun, whose light once switched on a World’s Fair.
- Vega The first star after the Sun ever photographed, the zero-point of the magnitude scale, and the pole star of 12,000 years from now.
- Capella The “little she-goat”: not one star but two yellow giants, each about as warm as the Sun, circling each other every 104 days.
- Rigel Orion’s knee: a blue-white supergiant tens of thousands of times more luminous than the Sun. Its name means “the foot”.
- Procyon “Before the dog”: it rises just ahead of Sirius. One of the Sun’s nearest bright neighbours, with a white-dwarf companion.
- Achernar “The river’s end” — the last star of Eridanus — and one of the flattest stars known, spinning so fast it is squashed like a lens.
- Betelgeuse Orion’s shoulder: a red supergiant so vast it would swallow Mars’s orbit. One day, perhaps in the next 100,000 years, it will explode.
- Hadar The second Pointer to the Southern Cross: a hot blue triple star nearly a hundred times farther away than its partner, Rigil Kentaurus.
- Altair The eagle’s eye, one of the nearest bright stars — spinning so fast its day is under ten hours, it is squashed into an egg shape.
- Acrux The foot of the Southern Cross, and the long arm’s signpost to the south celestial pole. A small telescope splits it in two.
- Aldebaran The bull’s fiery eye. Its name means “the follower” — it follows the Pleiades across the sky.
- Spica The ear of wheat in the Maiden’s hand. It helped Hipparchus discover that the whole sky slowly drifts.
- Antares The scorpion’s heart — “rival of Mars” — a red supergiant so large that, in place of the Sun, it would reach beyond the orbit of Mars.
- Pollux The immortal twin — an orange giant with a giant planet of its own, found in 2006.
- Fomalhaut “The mouth of the fish” — a lone bright star in an empty autumn sky, ringed by a vast belt of dust like our own Kuiper belt.
- Deneb The tail of the swan — one of the most luminous stars you can see, a white supergiant so far away its distance is still uncertain.
- Regulus “The little king” — the lion’s heart. It lies almost exactly on the Sun’s path, so the Moon and planets often pass it.
- Castor The mortal twin — and not one star but six, in three pairs, all bound together.
- Alnilam The middle star of Orion’s Belt, a blue supergiant — farther and more luminous than either of its neighbours.
- Polaris The North Star. Not the brightest — about fiftieth — but the one that doesn’t move. Its height above your horizon is your latitude.
- Algol The Demon Star — the eye of Medusa — which fades to a third of its brightness for a few hours every 2.87 days.
- Mizar The bend of the Big Dipper’s handle, with its faint companion Alcor beside it — an eyesight test used, the legend says, by Arab and Roman soldiers.
- Mintaka The westernmost star of Orion’s Belt, and almost exactly on the celestial equator — it rises due east and sets due west, everywhere on Earth.
- Albireo The swan’s beak — a small telescope splits it into gold and blue, the most famous colour contrast in the sky.
- Thuban The pole star of the pyramid builders. Around 2700 BC it sat almost exactly at the pole of the sky.
- Alcor The Rider on Mizar’s horse — the faint companion in the Big Dipper’s handle, and a classic test of eyesight.
- Mira “The wonderful”: the first star known to vary. Every 332 days it swells from invisible to easily visible and back.