A new photo shows Mars shining like a red star in the night sky, alongside the blue-tinged "Heart of the Lion" star, Regulus. Despite their drastic differences, the two objects currently look remarkably similar.
Regulus is the brightest star in the constellation Leo. The point of light is coming from a system containing four stars, arranged into two pairs of two, shining approximately 79 light-years from Earth — or around 2.8 million times farther from our planet than Mars. The system's blue tinge comes from its largest star, a blue subgiant around 4.5 times more massive than the sun. It often appears alongside, or gets eclipsed by, other solar system planets and Earth's moon, because it is situated near the ecliptic — the plane in the night sky where all solar system worlds orbit the sun.
