hip-26169

Its story

In the small southern constellation Mensa pulses a red M-type giant, a variable star, cool and vast, whose brightness sways to the rhythm of century-long breaths. Its light travelled close to 1,087 years of darkness to reach here, setting out when the caliphate of Córdoba lived its splendour and the translators of the Toledo school had not yet been born. It arrives now with a soft heartbeat, the visible echo of a twilight sun.