The

Its story

θ Pyxidis pours a reddish glow from 503 light-years, set within the small southern Compass that Lacaille named for the navigator's instrument of the eighteenth century. It is an M-class giant, an immense and cool star whose swollen surface gives it that fiery hue and announces, in slow stellar terms, the late chapters of its life. When this light first slipped from its atmosphere, Newton's Principia had not yet been published on Earth.