Musca
The pattern of the brightest stars resembles that of Ursa Minor, in that the stars form a pattern reminiscent of a bowl with a handle. Lying south-southeast of Acrux in neighbouring Crux is Alpha Muscae. It is the brightest star in the constellation with an apparent magnitude of 2.7. Lying around 310 light-years away, it is a blue-white star of spectral type B2IV-V that is around 4520 times as luminous and 8 times as massive as the Sun. The star is a Beta Cephei variable with about 4.7 times the Sun's diameter, and pulsates every 2.2 hours, varying by 1% in brightness. A nearby star of magnitude 13 may or may not be a companion star. Marking the fly's tail is Gamma Muscae, a blue-white star of spectral type B5V that varies between magnitudes 3.84 and 3.86 over a period of 2.7 days. It is a variable of a different type, classed as a slowly pulsating B star, a type of variable. It is around five times as massive as our Sun.
Musca
Three star systems have been discovered to have exoplanets. HD 111232 is a yellow main-sequence star around 78% as massive as the Sun around 95 light-years distant. It has a planet (HD 111232 b) around 6.8 times the mass of Jupiter that has an orbital period around 1143 days. HD 112410 is a yellow giant of spectral type G8III located around 439 light-years distant. With around 1.54 times the mass of our Sun, it is cooling and expanding along the red-giant branch, having left the main sequence after exhausting its core supply of hydrogen fuel. It has a substellar companion calculated to have a mass 9.2 times that of Jupiter and an orbital period of 124.6 days at a distance around 0.57 AU. Yet another member of the Lower Centaurus Crux subgroup, HD 100546 is a young, blue-white Herbig Ae/Be star of spectral type B9V that has yet to settle on the main sequence—the closest of these stars to Earth around 320 light-years distant. It is surrounded by a circumstellar debris disk from a distance of 0.2 to 4 AU, and again from 13 AU out to a few hundred AU, with evidence for a protoplanet forming at a distance around 47 AU. A gap exists between 4 and 13 AU, which appears to contain a large planet around 20 times the mass of Jupiter, although further examination of the disk profile indicates it might be a more massive object such as a brown dwarf or more than one planet. LP 145-141 is a white dwarf located 15 light-years distant—the fourth-closest to the Solar System. It is considered a good candidate to look for Jupiter-like planets, on account if its proximity and mass.