star
A star is an astronomical object comprising a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Many other stars are visible to the naked eye at night, but their immense distances from Earth make ...
Musca
Musca () is a small constellation in the deep southern sky. It was one of 12 constellations created by Petrus Plancius from the observations of Pieter Dirkszoon Keyser and Frederick de Houtman, and it first appeared on a celestial globe in ...
. It is visible to the naked eye as a faint, blue-white hued point of light with an
apparent visual magnitude
Apparent magnitude () is a measure of the brightness of a star or other astronomical object observed from Earth. An object's apparent magnitude depends on its intrinsic luminosity, its distance from Earth, and any extinction of the object's lig ...
of 4.79. The system is located around 406
light year
A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (), or 5.88 trillion miles ().One trillion here is taken to be 1012 ...
s away from the Sun. It is a member of the Lower Centaurs Crux subgroup of the Sco OB2 stellar association of co-moving stars.
The two main components of this system form a double-lined spectroscopic binary with a period of 2.4 days in a circular orbit. They are a detached
eclipsing binary
A binary star is a system of two stars that are gravitationally bound to and in orbit around each other. Binary stars in the night sky that are seen as a single object to the naked eye are often resolved using a telescope as separate stars, in ...
with a spectral type of B8V and a brightness that dips by 0.05 magnitude once per orbit. This pair consists of two components of similar mass and type.
Further away from the primary system are stars of magnitude 7.3 and 10, designated Eta Muscae B and C. It is unclear if these stars are gravitationally–bound to the main pair. Evidence for an additional component has been found with a 30-year cycle in the orbital behavior of the main pair. The data suggests an
orbital eccentricity
In astrodynamics, the orbital eccentricity of an astronomical object is a dimensionless parameter that determines the amount by which its orbit around another body deviates from a perfect circle. A value of 0 is a circular orbit, values b ...
of 0.29 for this suspected component, Eta Muscae D.