hip-40183

Its story

It burns as a blue B-type flame in Vela, a fragment of the ancient Argo divided by eighteenth-century astronomers. Its light took some 1,046 years to arrive: it set out around the year 980, when the Christian kingdoms of the northern Iberian peninsula were consolidating their frontier and the Song dynasty was organising China. That blue marks a very hot star with a relatively brief stellar life. On the sails of the mythic ship, it holds a blazing and deep post.