hip-64122

Its story

In the discreet centre of Virgo shines an orange K-class giant, lying a little over three hundred light-years away. Its coppery light departed when the first steamboats were ploughing the Seine and, in Vienna, Beethoven was preparing his last symphonies. It is one of those ageing stars, cool at the surface yet swollen to several times the Sun's size, which will never again return to the calm of their youth.