hip-41400

Its story

27 Cancri is an M-type red giant whose brightness does not hold steady: it oscillates slowly, a pulsation characteristic of aged stars that have already left the main sequence. Its light crossed some nine hundred light-years to reach us, departing in the early medieval era. It dwells in Cancer, a modest but historic zodiacal constellation that the Sun crosses each northern summer and which held the solstice in antiquity.