hip-40096

Its story

This white star of Puppis does not strictly belong to our neighbourhood: its light reaches us after a journey of more than 326,000 years, when Neanderthals still walked Europe and fire was barely a domestic novelty. So luminous that the naked eye catches it despite the distance, it had already burnt out or transformed while the Roman Empire rose and fell. To look at it is to lean over an echo older than the written word.