hip-103632

Its story

59 Cygni lives in the constellation of the Swan some 1,400 light-years out: a blue Be star spinning so fast that it sometimes wraps itself in a visible disc of cast-off gas. Its spectral variations have been logged without pause since 1916, and in the 1970s it crossed two short shell-star phases —the disc grew opaque and eclipsed the star from within. A slow pulse turned into a real chapter of twentieth-century astronomy.