hip-36345

Its story

Puppis, part of the old ship Argo, still ploughs across the southern sky. There glows this blue star — far hotter and more energetic than our Sun — whose light took about 745 years to arrive. It set out when the first European universities — Paris, Bologna, Oxford — were consolidating their autonomy and opening learning to social classes that had until then been excluded from study. B-type stars like this burn through in mere centuries what our Sun takes billions of years to consume, living a luminous, fierce existence at speed.