Star Fomalhaut

The star Fomalhaut, also called Piscis Austrini, is the brightest star in the constellation Southern Pisces. The name of the star means "mouth of the fish".

Facts about Fomalhaut

The star Fomalhaut is located in the interstellar cloud, just like the Sun. It is well visible on the horizon with an apparent brightness of 1.16mag. Often it seems to flicker in all colors of the spectrum, which can be explained by atmospheric turbulences. But in reality it shines white, because it belongs to the spectral class A3. Furthermore, Fomalhaut with a distance of 25 lightyears belongs to the close stars of the solar neighborhood. Additionally it is much hotter than the sun with a surface temperature of 8,500 Kelvin. Also Fomalhaut has about two and a half times the mass of the Sun and shines 17 times brighter than it. With an age of about 400 million years the star still belongs to the relatively young stars of the universe.

Visibility of Fomalhaut

The star Fomalhaut is best visible in the autumn evening sky. The constellation Southern Pisces, in which Fomalhaut is located, occurs just above the southern horizon in Central Europe.