hip-39690

Its story

About 1394 light-years away, in Vela, glows a luminous orange giant whose light set out around the seventh century, when classical knowledge was being preserved in monasteries and scattered libraries across the Mediterranean. Tens of times larger than the Sun and shining hundreds of times brighter, it is an amber bonfire that has exhausted the hydrogen in its core. Its late light traces a calm flame across the southern sky.