hip-73199

Its story

A red giant in Ursa Minor, cool and pulsating: its light wavers slowly, like a heart beating in another time. It set out toward us around 1566, when Pieter Bruegel the Elder was still painting Flemish villages in deep winter. Variable M-type stars reveal, in every flicker, the pulse of an aged, swollen body that one day will quietly shed its outer layers into the cosmic silence.