Zeta Arae
star in the constellation Ara
Zeta Arae is the third-brightest star in the southern constellation Ara. Its name is a Bayer designation that is Latinized from ζ Arae, and abbreviated Zeta Ara or ζ Ara. The apparent visual magnitude of this star is 3.1, which can be seen with the naked eye from suburban skies in the southern hemisphere. From the parallax measurements, it is located at a distance of approximately 490 light-years (150 parsecs) from Earth. The star is drifting closer to the Sun with a radial velocity of 6 km/s.
The spectrum of this star matches a stellar classification of K3 III. The luminosity class of 'III' indicates this is a giant star that has exhausted the hydrogen at its core and evolved away from the main sequence. However, some studies have suggested it is instead a supergiant. The star has 7-8 times the mass of the Sun and has expanded to 114 times the Sun's girth. It is radiating 3,800 times the luminosity of the Sun from its photosphere at an effective temperature of 4,246 K, giving it the orange hue of a K-type star.
In 1997, an excess of infrared emission was announced that may indicate circumstellar matter.
The public source identifies “Zeta Arae” as star in the constellation Ara. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Zeta, Arae and star.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2308513. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Zeta Arae” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.