Phoenix

Phoenix is a minor constellation in the southern sky. Named after the mythical phoenix, it was first depicted on a celestial atlas by Johann Bayer in his 1603 Uranometria. The French explorer and astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille charted the brighter stars and gave their Bayer designations in 1756. The constellation stretches from roughly −39° to −57° declination, and from 23.5h to 2.5h of right ascension. The constellations Phoenix, Grus, Pavo and Tucana, are known as the Southern Birds. The brightest star, Alpha Phoenicis, is named Ankaa, an Arabic word meaning 'the Phoenix'. It is an orange giant of apparent magnitude 2.4. Next is Beta Phoenicis, actually a binary system composed of two yellow giants with a combined apparent magnitude of 3.3. Nu Phoenicis has a dust disk, while the constellation boasts ten star systems with known planets and the recently discovered galaxy clusters El Gordo and the Phoenix Cluster—located 7.2 and 5.7 billion light years away respectively, two of the largest objects in the visible universe. Phoenix is the radiant of two annual meteor showers: the Phoenicids in December, and the July Phoenicids. ... Phoenix is a small constellation bordered by Fornax and Sculptor to the north, Grus to the west, Tucana to the south, touching on the corner of Hydrus to the south, and Eridanus to the east and southeast. The bright star Achernar is nearby. The three-letter abbreviation for the constellation, as adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922, is 'Phe'. ... Stars. ... Ankaa is the brightest star in the constellation. It is an orange giant of apparent visual magnitude 2.37 and spectral type K0.5IIIb, 77 light years distant from Earth and orbited by a secondary object about which little is known. Lying close by Ankaa is Kappa Phoenicis, a main sequence star of spectral type A5IVn and apparent magnitude 3.90. Located centrally in the asterism, Beta Phoenicis is the second brightest star in the constellation and another binary star. Together the stars, both yellow giants of spectral type G8, shine with an apparent magnitude of 3.31, though the components are of individual apparent magnitudes of 4.0 and 4.1 and orbit each other every 168 years. Zeta Phoenicis is an Algol-type eclipsing binary, with an apparent magnitude fluctuating between 3.9 and 4.4 with a period of around 1.7 days (40 hours); its dimming results from the component two blue-white B-type stars, which orbit and block out each other from Earth. ... Gamma Phoenicis is a red giant of spectral type M0IIIa and varies between magnitudes 3.39 and 3.49. It lies 235 light years away. ... Deep-sky objects. The constellation does not lie on the galactic plane of the Milky Way, and there are no prominent star clusters. NGC 625 is a dwarf irregular galaxy of apparent magnitude 11.0 and lying some 12.7 million light years distant. ... NGC 37 is a lenticular galaxy of apparent magnitude 14.66. It is approximately 42 kiloparsecs (137,000 light-years) in diameter and about 12.9 billion years old. Robert's Quartet (composed of the irregular galaxy NGC 87, and three spiral galaxies NGC 88, NGC 89 and NGC 92) is a group of four galaxies located around 160 million light-years away which are in the process of colliding and merging. ... Located in the galaxy ESO 243-49 is HLX-1, an intermediate-mass black hole — the first one of its kind identified. ... Lying within the bounds of the constellation is the gigantic Phoenix cluster, which is around 7.3 million light years wide and 5.7 billion light years away, making it one of the most massive galaxy clusters. [Phoenix (constellation). Wikipedia]