Sigma Fornacis
Sigma Fornacis is a white star, hotter than the Sun, in the constellation Fornax. It is in the long, steady part of its life, making helium from hydrogen in its core, as the Sun is.
How far
330 light years
The light you see from Sigma Fornacis tonight set off about 330 years ago. Everything we know about it is that much out of date.
At this distance the figure could be out by a tenth or so.
How bright
38 Suns
It gives out 38 times as much visible light as the Sun. It can just be seen by eye from a really dark place.
Astronomers put its brightness in our sky at magnitude 5.91. Smaller numbers are brighter, and the faintest stars the eye can see are about 6.
How hot
About 8,900 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.
Sigma FornacisThe Sun
In your sky now
Working it out…
Its names
It has no name of its own. Its name by constellation is a Greek letter and the constellation it is in, a way of naming begun by Johann Bayer in 1603.
- By constellation (Bayer)
- Sigma Fornacis
- Hipparcos catalogue
- HIP 17618
- Henry Draper catalogue
- HD 23738
- Spectral type
- A2V
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.