hip-21819

Its story

Above the bull's shoulders, deep in Taurus, shines a white class A star some 381 light-years away. Its light set out around 1644, the year Descartes published his Principia philosophiae and laid the foundations of a new mechanistic physics. Hot and crystalline of glow, it is one of those beacons that quietly watched humanity change its way of thinking about the cosmos during the scientific revolution.