Look low in the southeast this evening and you’ll see a bright white star — and not much else. This bright star, named Fomalhaut, has no other bright stars around it, so it’s sometimes called the Solitary One. Astronomers recently discovered a distant companion to Fomalhaut, though, which makes the star a little less lonely. Fomalhaut is one of our nearer neighbors, at a distance of just 25 light-years. And astronomers have long known that it isn't truly solitary, because a dim orange star orbits it at a large distance. But they recently discovered an even farther-flung stellar companion — a tiny red star that’s much smaller, fainter, and cooler than the Sun. That makes Fomalhaut a triple, with three stars that dance a complex orbital ballet. Yet both of the system’s dim stars are quite far from the bright one — the one that’s visible to the eye alone. In fact, the newly identified companion star is a whopping two-and-a-half light-years from the bright star. That's more than half the d
