hip-59831

Its story

2 Canum Venaticorum is a red giant, an M star so swollen that its radius exceeds about fifty solar radii. If it took the Sun's place, it would swallow Mercury without stopping and reach close to Venus's orbit. Its cool, reddish light crosses nearly eight hundred years to get here: it left in the late thirteenth century, when Arab and Latin astronomers were sharing tables and catalogues of the sky.