Rho

Its story

Rho Fornacis is a thick-disk star, a rarity among those the eye can still reach. Like Arcturus, it travels the galaxy on a markedly eccentric orbit, the legacy of an origin foreign to the main plane. It is a yellow-orange giant 269 light-years away, with an iron content below half the solar abundance: a chemical witness to an earlier era, formed when the universe was still poor in heavy metals.