The

Its story

Theta Ursae Minoris is an orange-red giant of the Little Bear, nearly a hundred times the Sun's radius and shining with 1,600 times its light, about 856 light-years from the Solar System. Its K5 spectrum shows a mild overabundance of cyanogen in the atmosphere —a quiet chemical fingerprint— and it is closing in on us at 25 km per second. It shines circumpolar for almost the whole northern hemisphere: it never sets.