Alp

Its story

The alpha star of Indus is a mature orange giant, swollen to nearly ten times the Sun's radius and burning at around 4,900 kelvin. Only 99 light-years away, it is one of the closest of its kind and the brightest in a constellation devised in the sixteenth century to honour the peoples of the South Pacific. Two red dwarfs trail it at more than two thousand astronomical units, too faint to be seen from here.