hip-28413

Its story

On the outskirts of Orion, this orange K-type giant burns with a coppery glow that took four hundred and twenty years to reach us. The light we see now departed when Galileo first turned his spyglass to the night sky —that very evening in 1610— and discovered the moons of Jupiter. While a new astronomy was being born in Padua, this aging sun had already swollen its atmosphere far beyond the size of our own, shining cold and steady on the Hunter's shoulder.