Rigil Kentaurus
Rigil Kentaurus is a yellow star, much like the Sun in temperature, in the constellation Centaurus. It is in the long, steady part of its life, making helium from hydrogen in its core, as the Sun is.
How far
4.3 light years
The light you see from Rigil Kentaurus tonight set off about 4.3 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
How bright
1.5 Suns
It gives out 1.5 times as much visible light as the Sun. From the Earth it is the fourth brightest star in the night sky. It is one of the brightest stars in the whole sky, easy to see even from a town.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude −0.01. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
About 5,600 K
That is the temperature of its surface, worked out from its colour, so it is a guide and not a measurement. It could be out by a few hundred degrees. The Sun's is 5,772 K. Hotter stars are bluer and cooler stars are redder, the same way a poker in a fire goes from red to white.
Rigil KentaurusThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
- Its own name
- Rigil Kentaurus
- By constellation (Bayer)
- Alpha-1 Centauri
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 71683
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 128620
- Spectral type
- G2V
Where this comes from
Distance, brightness, colour and spectral type are from the HYG star database, version 4.4, by David Nash, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Its distances are those measured by the Hipparcos satellite. The temperature is worked out here from the colour with the formula of Ballesteros (2012), and the words are written for this site.
To read more: Colour and brightness, How stars live and die, Measuring distance.