Alpha Octantis
star in the constellation Octans
Alpha Octantis is a binary star system in the constellation of Octans. The name is Latinized from α Octantis. Despite being labeled the "alpha" star by Lacaille, it is not the brightest star in the constellation—that title belongs to Nu Octantis. It is also the faintest "alpha" star overall, with Alpha Mensae a close second. It is visible to the naked eye as a faint, yellow-white-hued point of light with an overall apparent visual magnitude of approximately 5.13. The system is located approximately 148 light-years away from the Sun based on parallax.
This is a double-lined spectroscopic binary star which consists of two similar main sequence stars, each with spectral type F, orbiting each other with a period of just over 9 days and an eccentricity of 0.39. The pair form a Beta Lyrae-type eclipsing binary system, dropping by magnitude 0.04 during the primary eclipse. This system is a bright X-ray source with a luminosity of 22.78×1029 ergs s−1. The system displays an infrared excess suggesting the presence of a debris disk; with a temperature of 219 K and is orbiting at a distance of 9.8 AU from its host star.
“Alpha Octantis” enters the record as star in the constellation Octans. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Alpha, Octantis and star can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alpha Octantis” 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.