hip-84731

Its story

In the constellation of the Altar, 2,490 light-years away, lives an orange type-K star whose light departed in the heart of classical antiquity, when Pericles governed Athens and the Parthenon was being built. It is a luminous giant: though its surface is cooler than the Sun's, its swollen size lets it pour the light of hundreds of suns into space. Its coppery tone, sustained across millennia, is that of a liturgical flame burning unwitnessed in the southern sky.