# Fornax
**Fornax** (pronounced FOR-naks; genitive Fornacis, abbreviation For) is a southern constellation, one of the 88 regions recognized by the International Astronomical Union, whose name means "the Furnace". It was created in the 18th century by the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille, who originally called it Fornax Chemica, the chemical furnace, in honor of the chemist [Antoine Lavoisier](https://www.edgepedia.org/antoine-lavoisier).[1](https://iauarchive.eso.org/public/themes/constellations/) • [2](https://chandra.si.edu/photo/constellations/fornax.html) The constellation is better known to astronomers for what lies within its boundaries than for its faint stars: the nearby Fornax cluster of galaxies, the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy, and the patch of sky Hubble imaged for the Ultra Deep Field.[3](https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0949c/) • [4](https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/hubble-xdf/)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Name and origin | Fornax Chemica, the chemical furnace, named by Lacaille in honor of Antoine Lavoisier[2](https://chandra.si.edu/photo/constellations/fornax.html) |
| Area and rank | 398 square degrees, 0.96% of the celestial sphere, the 41st largest constellation[5](https://www.astropixels.com/constellations/charts/For.html) |
| Brightest star | Alpha Fornacis, apparent magnitude 3.80[6](https://www.go-astronomy.com/constellations.php?Name=Fornax) |
| Fornax cluster | One of the closest galaxy clusters beyond the Local Group, about 60 million light-years from Earth[7](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1038/) |
| Cluster mass | Velocity dispersion of about 370 km s⁻¹ and a mass of roughly 7 × 1013 solar masses, about a factor of 7 less than the Virgo cluster[8](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/428/1/834/1062078) |
| Deep-field location | Site of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and Extreme Deep Field, spanning 13.2 billion years of galaxy development[4](https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/hubble-xdf/) |
## Naming and history
Lacaille sailed to the [Cape of Good Hope](https://www.edgepedia.org/cape-of-good-hope) in 1750 on the vessel *Le Glorieux* and cataloged 10,305 southern stars, published in 1763 as *Coelum Australe Stelliferum*. He identified fourteen new constellations, which he named after scientific instruments of his era, including [Telescopium](https://www.edgepedia.org/telescopium), Microscopium, Horologium, and Fornax chemical.[9](https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies//Lacaille/) The Chandra account explains the choice of name: Lavoisier, an 18th-century French scientist, developed an accurate theory of combustion and a theory to explain chemical reactions, so a chemical furnace was considered an appropriate tribute.[2](https://chandra.si.edu/photo/constellations/fornax.html) [The Italian](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-italian) encyclopedia Treccani records that Lacaille in 1752 saw in the stars the figure of a chemical furnace with its alembic, and that the constellation lies in the southern hemisphere between Eridanus and Sculptor.[10](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/fornax/)
Under the modern IAU system, a constellation is an area of sky surrounded by a fixed boundary rather than a pattern of stars, and boundaries drawn along lines of right ascension and declination were adopted following proposals by Eugène Delporte at the 1925 IAU General Assembly.[11](https://www.iau.org/IAU/IAU/Astronomy-FAQs/Constellations.aspx?hkey=bb9dc841-0618-41b5-ac70-149741062141)
## Stars and extent
Fornax covers 398 square degrees, making it the 41st largest constellation, and contains 59 stars brighter than apparent magnitude 6.5.[5](https://www.astropixels.com/constellations/charts/For.html) Its brightest star, Alpha Fornacis, shines at magnitude 3.80, so the constellation contains no first-magnitude stars and is inconspicuous to the unaided eye.[6](https://www.go-astronomy.com/constellations.php?Name=Fornax) A catalog of the constellation lists 2,439 cataloged objects, including 1,308 galaxies, 1,095 stars, and 33 exoplanets.[12](https://spacecatalog.org/constellation/fornax)
## The Fornax cluster of galaxies
The Fornax Galaxy Cluster is one of the closest such groupings beyond our own [Local Group](https://www.edgepedia.org/local-group), lying about 60 million light-years from Earth toward the constellation.[7](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1038/) • [13](https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2019/fornax/index.html) A review of cluster properties gives a velocity dispersion of about 370 km s⁻¹, a core radius of 0.7 degrees (250 kpc), and a mass of roughly 7 × 1013 solar masses, about a factor of 7 less than Virgo; the Fornax Cluster Catalogue lists 350 members, compared with about 2,000 in the Virgo Cluster Catalogue.[8](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/428/1/834/1062078) The cluster is more regular in shape and probably more dynamically evolved than Virgo, and its central galaxy number density is about three times higher.[8](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/428/1/834/1062078)
Several members stand out:
- **NGC 1399** is the big elliptical galaxy at the cluster's heart, surrounded by a swarm of faint globular clusters; Chandra observations of the region around [NGC 1399](https://www.edgepedia.org/ngc-1399) and NGC 1404, two of the largest galaxies in the cluster, revealed about 30 pairs of stars expelled from their home galaxies by supernova recoil.[3](https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0949c/) • [13](https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2019/fornax/index.html)
- **NGC 1365**, the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, is a barred spiral about 60 million light-years away, noted for its straight bar and two prominent outer spiral arms, and is one of the best studied barred spirals.[7](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1038/) At an assumed cluster distance of 20 Mpc its diameter is 65 kpc and its total absolute magnitude −21.6, which its ESO observers described as a true supergiant galaxy.[14](https://www.eso.org/sci/publications/messenger/archive/no.31-mar83/messenger-no31.pdf)
Deep imaging campaigns have mapped the cluster's faint content. The Fornax Deep Survey with the VLT Survey Telescope covered about 28 square degrees with exposure times of 2 to 12 hours, reaching a surface brightness limit of about 28 mag per square arcsecond, and its dwarf galaxy catalog includes 564 dwarf galaxies in the cluster and the infalling Fornax A subgroup.[16](https://www.eso.org/sci/publications/announcements/sciann17326.html) • [17](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.08660) After Virgo, Fornax is the second nearest galaxy cluster to us, and its different mass and evolutionary state make it a useful comparison for understanding how environment shapes galaxies.[18](https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2018/12/aa33933-18.pdf)
## The Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy
Not to be confused with the cluster, the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy is a satellite of the [Milky Way](https://www.edgepedia.org/milky-way). A panoramic study using three years of [Dark Energy Survey](https://www.edgepedia.org/dark-energy-survey) data, uniformly covering 25 square degrees centered on the galaxy to a depth of g ≈ 23.5, found Fornax to be significantly more spatially extended than early studies suggested, with no statistically significant tidal disturbances down to a surface brightness limit of about 32.1 mag per square arcsecond.[19](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07801)
The dwarf is unusual among Local Group dwarf spheroidals in hosting a population of globular star clusters; it is one of only two such galaxies that do. An overdensity called Fornax 6, about 0.3 kpc in projection from the galaxy center, has been confirmed with MUSE spectroscopy as a genuine low-mass cluster likely undergoing tidal disruption, with a measured metallicity of [Fe/H] = −0.61 ± 0.03 dex, an age of about 3 Gyr, and a half-light radius of 8.8 pc, making it the youngest and most metal-rich member of Fornax's globular cluster system.[20](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27270) The cluster system has also been used to probe dark matter: simulations of Fornax's orbit find that although dark-matter mass loss can be substantial, the fraction of stellar mass lost by Fornax to the Milky Way is negligible even on the most eccentric orbit considered.[21](https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361%2F202451335)
## Deep fields in Fornax
Because a patch of Fornax looked mostly empty from ground-based telescopes, it was chosen for the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, allowing observations of the most distant galaxies.[22](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/universe-uncovered/hubble-deep-fields/) The Hubble Extreme Deep Field combines 10 years of photographs of a small patch of sky there, showing about 5,500 galaxies and spanning 13.2 billion years of galaxy development; more than 2,000 images were taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3 over a total of 50 days.[4](https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/hubble-xdf/) The same region of Fornax also contains JADES-ID1, a forming galaxy cluster, or protocluster, about 12.7 billion light-years from Earth at redshift z ≈ 5.7.[23](https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2026/protoc/index.html)
## References
1. [The Constellations, IAU](https://iauarchive.eso.org/public/themes/constellations/)
2. [Constellation Fornax, Chandra Photo Album](https://chandra.si.edu/photo/constellations/fornax.html)
3. [The Fornax Cluster of galaxies, ESO](https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0949c/)
4. [Hubble Extreme Deep Field, NASA Science](https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/hubble-xdf/)
5. [Fornax (For) constellation chart, Astro Pixels](https://www.astropixels.com/constellations/charts/For.html)
6. [Fornax Constellation, Go Astronomy](https://www.go-astronomy.com/constellations.php?Name=Fornax)
7. [An Elegant Galaxy in an Unusual Light, ESO](https://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1038/)
8. [Herschel Fornax Cluster Survey I, MNRAS](https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/428/1/834/1062078)
9. [Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille biography, MacTutor](https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies//Lacaille/)
10. [Fornax, Treccani Enciclopedia](https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/fornax/)
11. [The Constellations, IAU FAQ](https://www.iau.org/IAU/IAU/Astronomy-FAQs/Constellations.aspx?hkey=bb9dc841-0618-41b5-ac70-149741062141)
12. [Fornax constellation, SpaceCatalog.org](https://spacecatalog.org/constellation/fornax)
13. [Fornax Cluster, Chandra Photo Album, May 28, 2019](https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2019/fornax/index.html)
14. [The Galaxy NGC 1365, The Messenger No. 31, ESO](https://www.eso.org/sci/publications/messenger/archive/no.31-mar83/messenger-no31.pdf)
15. [The giant radio source Fornax A, ApJ 346, L17 (1989)](https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1989ApJ...346L..17F)
16. [First Data Release of the Fornax Deep Survey, ESO](https://www.eso.org/sci/publications/announcements/sciann17326.html)
17. [The Fornax Deep Survey with VST VI, arXiv:1904.08660](https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.08660)
18. [The Fornax Deep Survey with VST, A&A 620, A165 (2018)](https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/pdf/2018/12/aa33933-18.pdf)
19. [Morphology and structure of stellar populations in the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy, arXiv:1809.07801](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.07801)
20. [Revisiting the enigmatic sixth star cluster in the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy, arXiv:2608.27270](https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.27270)
21. [Tidal mass loss in the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy, A&A (2024)](https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361%2F202451335)
22. [Hubble's Deep Fields, NASA Science](https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/universe-uncovered/hubble-deep-fields/)
23. [JADES-ID1 protocluster, Chandra Photo Album](https://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2026/protoc/index.html)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Physical world and mathematics › Astronomy › Stars and galaxies › Constellations, star names, and catalogs › Individual constellations*
*Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 15, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026 · Last review: Oct 15, 2026*
*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*
License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license