Two of the three stars are supergiants. It’s 24 times as heavy as our sun. Emerson/VISTA. Orion’s Belt is a popularly known grouping of stars (asterism) in the night sky. Mintaka is a multiple star system at around 1.200 light-years away from Earth.

We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. But this article is just about Orion’s belt. The asterism and the constellation are visible in northern latitudes from November to February. But while it may be the star of the show (pun intended), it can’t overshadow Alnitak Ab, a 7.2 million-year-old blue dwarf, probably the oldest star in Orion’s belt. The photograph appeared as the Astronomy Picture of the Day on October 23, 2010. The asterism consists of three bright stars Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Orion’s Belt stars and Flame Nebula, photo: Davide De Martin, Digitized Sky Survey, ESA, ESO, NASA FITS Liberator. This asterism is best viewed in the early night sky during the Northern Winter / Southern Summer. When Orion is near the meridian, Mintaka is the right-most of the Belt’s stars when viewed from the Northern Hemisphere facing south.


The Deep-Sky Objects surrounding Orion’s Belt. Betelgeuse and Bellatrix mark the hunter’s shoulders and Saiph and Rigel mark his feet. The main component is the binary star, one consisting of a B-type giant (B0.5III) and a smaller yet hotter O-type star (O9.5 II). Right now, let’s focus on Orion’s belt made by three stars. It is located at the western end of Orion’s belt. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. Two large pyramids and a temple in Mexico were discovered to point directly at Orion’s belt as well. In Chinese, Shēn Xiù – meaning Three Stars asterism, refers to an asterism consisting of Alnilam, Alnitak, Mintaka and, In Egyptian mythology, the gods descended from. Orion's belt forms the center of the constellation, bisecting it into upper and lower halves. The star is a large blue supergiant with a visual magnitude of 1.70 and an absolute magnitude of -6.37. The stars were collectively known by different names in different countries and cultures, including the Weighing Beam in Chinese and Al Nijād (the Belt), Al Nasak (the Line), Al Alkāt (the Golden Grains/Nuts) and Al Mīzān al Ḥaqq (the Accurate Scale Beam) in Arabic. In regards to the three stars, the names of the outer two both mean “belt” in Arabic. The two stars at either end of Orion’s Belt – Alnitak and Mintaka – are actually closer together because the middle star, Alnilam, which is the brightest of the three, is also much more distant from Earth than the other two. For observers in the northern hemisphere, the constellation lies in the southwestern sky. While it may be … huge as heck, it’s still relatively young. But note that on a cosmic scale, “close together” means a few light-years away. It has surface average temperatures of around 29.000 K. Its radius is around 16.5 times that of the sun.

The fifth component, HD 36485, is around 9 times more massive than the sun with around 5.7 solar radii. They also mark the northern night sky when the Sun is at its lowest point, and thus they were a clear marker for ancient timekeeping. Particularly, they used constellations of stars.

The fourth, Mintaka B, has only 0.77 solar radii, 0.4 the sun’s luminosity and its surface temperatures are around 5.324 K, similar to the sun’s. Orion, in Greek mythology, was a giant hunter. The star is around 190.000 times more luminous than the Sun.