: a southern constellation that is visible between the constellations of Eridanus and Sculptor and that is represented by the figure of a laboratory furnace
The Sextans object is an example of a dwarf galaxy, a class of small, low-mass galaxies only a few thousand light-years in diameter. Harlow Shapley discovered the first examples of dwarf satellite galaxies in 1938, one in the constellation Sculptor and one in Fornax.—Astronomy, July 1990
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