hip-41039

Its story

Seventeen hundred years ago, as Constantinople was being proclaimed the empire’s new capital, a blue star in Vela released the beam now reaching our eyes. It belongs to the lineage of hot giants —suns so vehement they burn through their fuel in mere tens of millions of years. Its blue-white hue betrays a surface above twenty thousand degrees, scorching beside the temperate six thousand of the Sun. To look at it is to lean over an age that did not yet call itself history.