Space & the universe

There is a piece of laboratory equipment in the night sky

Most constellations carry myth — heroes, beasts, gods. Antlia carries an air pump, a bit of 18th-century experimental hardware that Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille lifted into the southern sky, and it stuck. It is faint enough that you need to know where to look, sitting just north of the sails of the old ship Argo Navis, and its brightest star barely flickers. It is a good reminder that the sky's names are a record of what the people naming them happened to admire.

Two stars in Antlia, the pair known as S Antliae, orbit so tightly inside a shared envelope of gas that they are destined to merge into one star.

Read the whole of Antlia on Wikipedia

The article comes from Wikipedia and is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. The introduction above is our own.