hip-81141

Its story

In the small southern constellation of the Bird of Paradise glows an orange giant whose light took 809 years to cross the black ocean. When it left, the Teutonic Knights were raising castles on the Baltic and medieval Europe simmered with crusades and pilgrimages. A class-K sun, cooler than ours yet far larger, it looks like an amber ember suspended in one of the least-frequented corners of the southern sky.