Fornax (The Furnace in Latin) is a small Southern hemisphere constellation, which while on the face of it looks like just 2 stars, actually punches way above it's diminutive size.
The brightest Star Alpha Fornacis is a fascinating system, made up of a binary pair, an aging F type star, having just finished it's main sequence (α For A), and the companion (α For B) a G type star in the main sequence but with very peculiar past.
The system is 46 light years from our Sun, and has a high proper motion, meaning it's orbiting our galaxy in a significantly different way to the local group of stars.
350,000 years ago, it came within .2 light years of the star Nu Horologii, both systems show large debris fields and would have impacted on each other. In the Solar system's history, similar close calls have pushed oort objects inwards, and there is speculation that such close calls can lead to a significant transfer of objects between systems.
Back to α For B, the star shows signs of being what is referred to as a blue straggler, an outlier of the standard HR stellar evolution, and common in the confines of particular blue giant clusters. However, the system is showing an age of around 2 billion years, and blue stragglers like blue giants generally rarely make it past a few 100 million years.
Astronomers believe that this star has cheated death by accreting matter or merging with a companion star early on, and still remains in the main sequence to this day.
The second star β For is a red clump evolving star, similar to α For A, entering it's helium fusing red giant stage.
Fornax has not just a few galaxies, but an entire cluster named after it. The Fornax cluster of galaxies lies around 62 million light years from the Milky Way, comprising of a beautiful array of different galaxies, with NGC 1399 at its core.
Like all massive elliptical galaxies, they lack star formation, so very little in the way of dust and gas lanes, or clusters of bright new blue giant stars, in fact, almost all the stars here are aging old stars, probably around the same age as our own Sun, hence the more yellowish colour of the object.
It has at the centre a supermassive blackhole, over 100 times the size of the Milky Way, at around 500 million solar masses.
This galaxy is one of the furthest objects ever seen, the light has travelled 13.1 billion light years, however, the object is believed to now be around 30 billion light years from us.
