hip-40321

Its story

It burns in Puppis with the bluish-white blaze of B-class stars, the hottest and most violent the human eye can discern. Its light has been reaching us for a little over a thousand years —it set out when the northern Iberian Christian kingdoms were beginning the expansion that would reshape the peninsula and the monks of Cluny were reforming monastic life. It is a massive variable, dozens of times more luminous than the Sun. Its silent pulse reminds us that the brightest stars tend to live brief, intense lives.