Bet

Its story

The second-brightest star of the dim constellation of the Indian shines with orange light from 612 light-years away — a distance that reveals an intrinsically luminous giant, not a nearby ember. The light now crossing our telescopes set out in the late Renaissance and travelled in silence while empires rose and kings fell. In the southern sky it marks one of the shoulders of the imaginary hunter sketched by Pieter Keyser and Frederick de Houtman after their voyage home from Java in the 16th century.