Omi

Its story

Omicron Puppis is a hot blue B-type star about 1,418 light-years away, in the Stern of the old Ship Argo —one of the four constellations modern astronomy carved out of that vast mythological vessel of the southern sky—. Its brightness shifts gently, the signature of Be stars, which spin so fast they wrap themselves in an equatorial disk of gas whose emission flares and fades over the years. Every faint flicker is the fingerprint of a rotation pushed almost to the very limit of the star’s own gravity.