Pictor (Latin for "painter") is a small faint constellation between the brilliant star Canopus and the Large Magellanic Cloud in the Southern Celestial Hemisphere. Normally represented as an easel, Pictor was invented and named by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille in the 18th century. The constellation's brightest star is Alpha Pictoris, a white main sequence star of apparent magnitude 3.3. Pictor also hosts RR Pictoris, a cataclysmic variable star system that flared up as a nova in 1925, reaching magnitude 1.2. Pictor's second-brightest star, Beta Pictoris, is surrounded by an unusual dust disk rich in carbon. HD 40307, an orange dwarf, has six planets orbiting it, one of which—HD 40307 g—is a potential super-Earth in the circumstellar habitable zone. Kapteyn's Star, the nearest star in Pictor to Earth, is a red dwarf 12.76 light-years away that was found to have two super-Earths in orbit in 2014. Pictor A is a radio galaxy that is shooting a jet of plasma 800,000 light-years long from a supermassive black hole at its centre. In 2006, a gamma ray burst—GRB 060729—was observed in Pictor; its X-ray afterglow was detectable for nearly two years afterwards.
Read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictor
_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:
1874:
In one of the longest cases ever heard in an English court, the defendant was convicted of perjury for attempting to assume the identity of the heir to the Tichborne baronetcy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tichborne_case
1893:
USS Indiana, the lead ship of her class and the first battleship in the United States Navy comparable to foreign battleships of the time, was launched. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Indiana_(BB-1)
1914:
In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Greeks living in southern Albania proclaimed the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_Republic_of_Northern_Epirus
1986:
Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated by a lone gunman in Stockholm while walking home from a movie theatre with his wife Lisbet Palme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olof_Palme
2002:
During the 2002 Gujarat violence in India, mobs of Hindus attacked Muslims in Naroda Patiya and Chamanpura, resulting in 166 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulbarg_Society_massacre
_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:
unbirthday: A day that is not one's birthday but is celebrated as though it were https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/unbirthday
___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough. --Michel de Montaigne https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_de_Montaigne