Rigel is the brightest star in Orion, 6th brightest in the night sky. It’s a bluish-white supergiant, 70 solar radii in diameter, and located between 700-900 light-years away. Rigel illuminates dust clouds and is part of a star system with Rigel A as the primary star.
Rigel is the brightest star in the constellation Orion, where it forms the “left foot” of Orion (right from Earth’s perspective). It is the sixth brightest star in the night sky. Its name comes from the Arabic Riǧl Ǧawza al-Yusra, which means “Left foot of the central one”. Instead of referring to the constellation as “Orion,” the Arab world referred to it as “the central one.”
The star is a bluish-white supergiant containing 17 solar masses of material, shining with a luminosity 40,000 times greater than the Sun. As a supergiant, it is about 70 solar radii in diameter, or about a third of the distance from the Sun to Earth. Located between 700 and 900 light-years from Earth (astronomers don’t know for sure), Rigel is the brightest star in the near-Earth part of the Milky Way. The next brightest star, Deneb, is a whopping 3,300 light-years away. Rigel is closely aligned in the sky with the Orion Nebula, one of the few nebulae visible to the naked eye, even though it’s actually twice as far from Earth.
Rigel’s brightness is bright enough to illuminate various dust clouds in its vicinity, such as the famous Witch’s Head Nebula, located 1,000 light-years away. Like many stars in the universe, it is part of a system with more than one star: the one most people know is Rigel A, while Rigel B is used to refer to a pair of main-sequence stars orbiting a distance of 2200 AU. Since Rigel A is much brighter, it is referred to as the “primary” star while the two components of Rigel B are “secondary”.
The star is surrounded by a cloud of ejected gas. This is present in many supergiant stars, a side effect of their low density and high internal temperatures and solar wind.
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