Indus
Origin
Indus is a southern hemisphere constellation and was first mapped by European explorers in 1598.
The English translation of its name is ‘the Indian’. Indus does not contain any of the 100 brightest stars in the night sky, but it does contain two stars of notable interest — Alpha Indi, Beta Indi, Delta Indi, and Epsilon Indi.
Bright Stars
Alpha Indi is the brightest star in the constellation of Indus. It is a magnitude-3.1 orange giant.
Beta Indi is a 3.7-magnitude star.
Delta Indi is a white star of apparent magnitude 4.4.
Epsilon Indi is a candidate for SETI studies and is a 4.7-magnitude yellow dwarf star, similar to the Sun.
Photo of the constellation Indus produced by NOIRLab in collaboration with Eckhard Slawik, a German astrophotographer.
The annotations are from a standardized set of 88 western IAU constellations and stick figures from Sky & Telescope. Please find here a non-annotated version of the image.
Credit: E. Slawik/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/M. Zamani
Latin name
English name
Indus
Pronunciation
IN-dus
Abbreviation
Ind
Notable Objects
There are three galaxies of interest within the constellation Indus:
- NGC 7038 is a 12th-magnitude spiral galaxy 210 million light-years away.
- NGC 7049 is a lenticular galaxy about 100 million light-years distant shining at magnitude 10.7.
- NGC 7090 is a magnitude-10.5 spiral galaxy about 31 million light-years away from Earth.
