Mekbuda

Its story

Mekbuda is one of the most celebrated variable stars in the sky: a yellow G-type supergiant 1,376 light-years away whose brightness rises and falls with a regular ten-day pulse. It belongs to the Cepheid family, those cosmic beacons whose cadence revealed to Henrietta Leavitt how to measure distances between galaxies. Its name, from the Arabic «Al-Maqbūḑa», means «the drawn-in hand» of the Twins. Beat after beat, it keeps time for an expanding universe.