hip-41080

Its story

Along the long body of Hydra, the serpent that coils across nearly a quarter of the sky, pulses a red M-type giant, cool and vast, far older and more swollen than the Sun. Its light set out around 1,289 years ago, when the Carolingians were reorganising western Europe and Abbasid astronomers were translating Aristarchus into Arabic. It arrives now stained with the deep red of suns already entering the twilight of their existence.