hip-41321

Its story

In Volans, the flying fish, a southern constellation born in 17th-century Dutch maps, shines this yellow G-type star, spectral sister to the Sun but far more distant. Its light set out 367 years ago, around 1657, when Christiaan Huygens was building the first pendulum clock in The Hague and revolutionizing the measurement of time. Its golden glow evokes a distant Sun seen from another bend of the cosmos, a familiar light dissolved into unimaginable kilometers.