Alp

Its story

It marks the apex of Pictor, the small constellation of the Painter's Easel sketched by the abbé Lacaille beneath Cape Town's skies in the 18th century. A blue-white subgiant spinning on its axis at more than 200 km/s, its dizzying rotation places it in a rare family — the Lambda Boötis stars — whose atmospheres show an anomalous scarcity of calcium and other metals. Roughly 97 light-years away, it shines with the force of forty suns from a furnace of 7,500 degrees.