Rho

Its story

Rho Ursae Majoris peers from the head region of the Great Bear, far from the famous Plough asterism but inside the same ancestral figure. A red type M giant some 315 light-years away, its light is the warm pulp of an expanding atmosphere, swollen to several times the Sun's diameter. Its discreet ruddiness is a reminder that even within the most recognisable constellation of the northern sky there live stars at very different chapters of their biographies.