hip-34561

Its story

In Canis Major, near Sirius though far more distant, burns a variable class B star at 2,234 light-years. Its light departed when the Romans were consolidating their dominion over the Iberian Peninsula and aqueducts were beginning to replace the ancient Iberian channels. It is hot, massive and shifting in brightness: a blue beacon whose pulsation reaches us after two millennia of travel, crossing the interstellar dust of the Milky Way.