hip-113031

Its story

74 Aquarii is a B-type blue variable 826 light-years away inside Aquarius. Stars like this are hot cauldrons that pulse or shift brightness irregularly, as if their atmosphere were breathing. Its light set out around the year 1200, in the depths of the European Middle Ages, when the great Gothic cathedrals were rising. That such a star, brief in cosmic terms, can still be visible twelve centuries after its light departed gives a measure of the distances of the universe.