Adhil

Adhil is Xi Andromedae, a faint star of about fourth to fifth magnitude at roughly 200 light years, an orange giant that has evolved off the main sequence. It is not a conspicuous object, and its interest is chiefly in its name: Adhil comes from the Arabic al-dhayl, the train or skirt, marking its place on the trailing hem of the robe of Andromeda, the chained princess of the constellation. It is one of a number of dim stars that carry a traditional name out of all proportion to their brightness, the name preserving an old mapping of the human figure onto the stars.

Orange giants like Adhil represent a common evolutionary stage: a star that has exhausted the hydrogen at its core, begun fusing hydrogen in a shell around an inert helium core, and swollen and cooled as a result, a phase the Sun itself will pass through in several billion years. At fourth to fifth magnitude and roughly two hundred light years away, Adhil is bright enough to have been catalogued individually since antiquity but never bright enough to draw sustained attention. Adhil's designation as Xi Andromedae under the Bayer system places it well down the Greek-letter sequence, a rough but not perfectly reliable guide to relative brightness within a constellation that nonetheless correctly signals how minor a star this is.

Sources Star Names: Their Lore and MeaningRichard Hinckley Allen with AstronomyAndrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and Sidney C. Wolff (OpenStax)

Adhil carries no strong independent delineation in the astrological tradition; too faint to have drawn the attention of Ptolemy, it is read, when read at all, as part of the constellation Andromeda and by the general character the compilers assigned that figure. This is the ordinary situation for the dim named stars: the compiling tradition, in English chiefly Vivian Robson's Fixed Stars of 1923, attaches a detailed reading only to the bright stars and treats the rest by association or passes over them. Its dependable content is the plain astronomy, a faint evolved star on the edge of the constellation, while any personality reading attached to it is thin and late.

Names of exactly this kind, precise, minor, and largely without an accompanying interpretive tradition, are the bread and butter of Richard Hinckley Allen's 1899 reference Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, still the standard English source for the fixed-star nomenclature the modern astrological lists inherited; a great many of Allen's Arabic names in turn trace to the seventeenth-century Cairo astronomer Al-Achsasi al-Mouakket, whose star calendar of about 1650 was unknown in the West until Edward Ball Knobel published it in 1895, only four years before Allen's book appeared and folded its contents into general circulation. Adhil is a clear case in point: a securely translated Arabic descriptive name attached to a star too faint for Ptolemy to have singled out, surviving in the record purely as a position on the robe of a mapped figure.