hip-105259

Its story

At 1930 light-years, in the royal crown of Cepheus, pulses a blue variable whose light set out around the first century, when Pliny the Elder was writing his «Natural History» and cataloguing the knowledge of the Roman world. Its brightness shifts in subtle rhythms that modern astronomers track to probe its inner layers. It is a restless beacon of the polar sky, suspended above the mythological realm of the Ethiopian king.