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Its story

98 Aquarii burns as an orange sun 163 light-years away, in a stretch of Aquarius where the naked eye barely separates its magnitude-3.96 glow from the muted backdrop of the Water Bearer. It is a K-type giant well past its youth —swollen, golden, cooler than the Sun yet far more luminous. Its light set out for us back when Europe was only beginning to dream of orbital telescopes.