Fornax

Fornax /ˈfɔrnæks/ is a constellation in the southern sky. Its name is Latin for furnace. It was named by French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in 1756. Fornax is one of the 88 modern constellations. ... Stars. Alpha Fornacis is a binary star that can be resolved by small amateur telescopes. The primary is a yellow-tinged main-sequence star of magnitude 3.9 and the secondary is a yellow star of magnitude 6.5; the secondary may actually be a variable star. It has a period of 300 years and is 46 light-years from Earth. Beta Fornacis is a yellow-hued giant star of magnitude 4.5, 169 light-years from Earth. Deep-sky objects. Fornax has been the target of investigations into the furthest reaches of the universe. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field is located within Fornax, and the Fornax Cluster, a small cluster of galaxies, lies primarily within Fornax. At a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain, a team from University of Queensland described 40 unknown "dwarf" galaxies in this constellation; follow-up observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope revealed that ultra compact dwarfs are much smaller than previously known dwarf galaxies, about 120 light-years (37 pc) across. NGC 1049 is a globular cluster 500,000 light-years from Earth. It is in the Fornax Dwarf Galaxy. UDFj-39546284, a galaxy which was identified as the most distant object in the universe from Earth as of January 2011, is located in Fornax. ... HIP 13044 b is an exoplanet in the constellation, reported in November 2010, that was discovered to have originated outside of the galaxy. NGC 1097 is a barred spiral galaxy in Fornax, about 60 million light-years from Earth. ... NGC 1365 is another barred spiral galaxy located at a distance of 60 million light-years from Earth. Like NGC 1097, it is also a Seyfert galaxy. ... NGC 1360 is a planetary nebula in Fornax with a magnitude of approximately 9.0, 978 light-years from Earth. Its central star is of magnitude 11.4, an unusually bright specimen. It is five times the size of the famed Ring Nebula in Lyra at 6.5 arcminutes. Unlike the Ring Nebula, NGC 1360 is clearly elliptical. Fornax A is a radio galaxy with extensive radio lobes that corresponds to the optical galaxy NGC 1316, a 9th-magnitude galaxy. The Fornax Dwarf galaxy is a dwarf galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. [Fornax. Wikipedia]