hip-19777

Its story

39 Eridani is a wide binary whose primary —an orange K3 giant more than a billion years old— has burned through its core hydrogen and swollen to twelve times the Sun's radius. It is a candidate super-metal-rich star: its atmosphere holds far more iron than the Sun's. It shines with the strength of eighty-one Suns from 242 light-years away, in the mythic waters of the river Eridanus.