Short answers, pulled from the story.
Alpha Centauri is the closest star system to the Sun and sits just 4.4 light-years away from Earth. This triple star system consists of two yellow-hued stars orbiting each other every 80 years and a faint red dwarf named Proxima Centauri that circles them at a distance of approximately one million years.
BPM 37093 is a white dwarf star nicknamed Lucy that contains carbon atoms thought to have formed a crystalline structure. This celestial body effectively makes it a diamond star on a massive scale with a solid core of immense size and density.
Omega Centauri is a naked-eye globular cluster located 17,000 light-years away with a diameter of 150 light-years. It is the largest and brightest globular cluster in the Milky Way containing several million stars and shining at ten times the size of the next-largest cluster.
Centaurus A is one of the closest active galaxies to Earth located 11 million light-years away and featuring a supermassive black hole at its core. This galaxy expels massive jets of matter that emit radio waves due to synchrotron radiation and contains dust lanes believed to be the result of a previous merger with another galaxy.
The figure of Centaurus can be traced back to a Babylonian constellation known as the Bison-man which was depicted as a 4-legged bison with a human head. The Greeks later depicted the constellation as a centaur and gave it its current name mentioning it by Eudoxus in the 4th century BC and Aratus in the 3rd century BC.
PDS 70 is a low mass T Tauri star found in the constellation that captured the first conclusive image of a protoplanetary disk containing a nascent exoplanet named PDS 70b in July 2018. This discovery provides astronomers with a rare opportunity to study the formation of planets in real-time as the disk contains the raw materials necessary for planet formation.