Rigel is a blue supergiant star in the constellation of Orion. It has the Bayer designation β Orionis, which is Latinized to Beta Orionis and abbreviated Beta Ori or β Ori. Rigel is the brightest and most enormous component – and the eponym – of a star system of at least four stars that appear as a single blue-white point of buoyant to the naked eye. This system is located at a isolate of approximately 860 light-years (260 pc) from the Sun.

A star of spectral type B8Ia, Rigel is calculated to be anywhere from 61,500 to 363,000 period as lustrous as the Sun, and 18 to 24 get older as massive, depending upon the method and assumptions used. Its radius is higher than seventy times that of the Sun, and its surface temperature is 12,100 K. Due to its stellar wind, Rigel’s mass-loss is estimated to be ten million times that of the Sun. With an estimated age of seven to nine million years, Rigel has exhausted its core hydrogen fuel, expanded, and cooled to become a supergiant. It is normal to subside its animatronics as a type II supernova, leaving a neutron star or a black hole as a total remnant, depending upon the initial growth of the star.

Rigel varies slightly in brightness, its apparent magnitude ranging from 0.05 to 0.18. It is classified as an Alpha Cygni flexible due to the amplitude and periodicity of its brightness variation, as skillfully as its spectral type. Its intrinsic variability is caused by pulsations in its unstable atmosphere. Rigel is generally the seventh-brightest star in the night proclaim and the brightest star in Orion, though it is occasionally outshone by Betelgeuse, which varies beyond a larger range.

A triple-star system is divided from Rigel by an angle of 9.5 arc seconds. It has an apparent magnitude of 6.7, making it 1/400th as bright as Rigel. Two stars in the system can be seen by large telescopes, and the brighter of the two is a spectroscopic binary. These three stars are whatever blue-white main-sequence stars, each three to four mature as deafening as the Sun. Rigel and the triple system orbit a common center of gravity once a mature estimated to be 24,000 years. The inner stars of the triple system orbit each other every 10 days, and the outer star orbits the inner pair all 63 years. A much fainter star, separated from Rigel and the others by approximately an arc minute, may be part of the same star system.