hip-111022

Its story

5 Lacertae is a colossal spectroscopic binary more than sixteen hundred light-years away, in a small constellation Hevelius drew as a lizard between Cygnus and Andromeda. Its primary is an orange-red supergiant of some 359 solar radii and twenty-five thousand solar luminosities; orbiting alongside it is a blue main-sequence star, on a period of just under 42 years. Its brightness drifts irregularly between magnitudes 4.4 and 4.6.