hip-3478

Its story

At 623 light-years, in the mythological W of Cassiopeia, burns a class B blue star whose light set out toward the end of the fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer was writing the «Canterbury Tales». It belongs to a young, fierce stellar breed — tens of thousands of degrees at the surface, pouring out a blue-white light that betrays its power. It guards a regal profile in the northern autumn sky.