Eta

Its story

It is not one star but two: two suns almost identical to our own, both G-type, orbiting together just 61 light-years away in the Northern Crown. That stellar diadem — associated in myth with the crown Dionysus offered to Ariadne — harbours here one of the closest analogues of our solar system's central engine known in our neighbourhood. In 2001 a brown dwarf was further discovered at the enormous distance of 3,640 astronomical units, drifting slowly around the pair. A silent family that the sky keeps as an echo of our own.