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Concept
Acrux
Summary
Acrux is the brightest star in the southern constellation of Crux. It has the Bayer designation α Crucis, which is Latinised to Alpha Crucis and abbreviated Alpha Cru or α Cru. With a combined visual magnitude of +0.76, it is the 13th-brightest star in the night sky. It is the most southerly star of the asterism known as the Southern Cross and is the southernmost first-magnitude star, 2.3 degrees more southerly than Alpha Centauri. This system is located at a distance of 321 light-years from the Sun.
To the naked eye Acrux appears as a single star, but it is actually a multiple star system containing six components. Through optical telescopes, Acrux appears as a triple star, whose two brightest components are visually separated by about 4 arcseconds and are known as Acrux A and Acrux B, α1 Crucis and α2 Crucis, or α Crucis A and α Crucis B. Both components are B-type stars, and are many times more massive and luminous than the Sun. α1 Crucis is itself a spectroscopic binary with components designated α Crucis Aa (officially named Acrux, historically the name of the entire system) and α Crucis Ab. Its two component stars orbit every 76 days at a separation of about 1 astronomical unit (AU). HR 4729, also known as Acrux C, is a more distant companion, forming a triple star through small telescopes. C is also a spectroscopic binary, which brings the total number of stars in the system to at least five.
α Crucis (Latinised to Alpha Crucis) is the system's Bayer designation; α1 and α2 Crucis, those of its two main components stars. The designations of these two constituents as Acrux A and Acrux B and those of A's components—Acrux Aa and Acrux Ab—derive from the convention used by the Washington Multiplicity Catalog (WMC) for multiple star systems, and adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
The historical name Acrux for α1 Crucis is an "Americanism" coined in the 19th century, but entering common use only by the mid 20th century. In 2016, the International Astronomical Union organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalog and standardize proper names for stars.
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