hip-114104

Its story

1 Cassiopeiae is a blue giant of class B0.5 III, so hot and luminous that astronomers have proposed it as a standard reference for its spectral class. It burns at 27,200 K —nearly five times hotter than the Sun— and pours out eighteen thousand times its light from 1,129 light-years away. The beam reaching us tonight left in the depths of the Middle Ages, before any Gothic cathedral in Europe had yet been built.