hip-36168

Its story

Another tenant of Canis Major: a blue-white B-type variable star whose light has been travelling almost twelve hundred and fifty years. It set out when Charlemagne had just been crowned emperor and Europe was inaugurating the Holy Empire. Far hotter and more massive than the Sun, its brightness is not quite constant: it oscillates with its own pulse, as if the rhythm of its heart were transferred to its light. A Carolingian forge whose glow has not yet finished arriving.