hip-21604

Its story

Another inhabitant of Taurus, this time a hot blue-white B-class that pulses lightly: a variable star at three hundred and thirty light-years. Its light departed around 1696, in the years when Newton was serving as Master of the Royal Mint in London and reforming English coinage. The shifting brightness of this star —small swells and lulls— is the cadence of its own atmosphere, not a whim of the observer.