hip-42715

Its story

Among the swelling sails of Vela burns a blue B-class star, variable and still young, whose cold light took almost five hundred years to reach us. When it left, Magellan was preparing the first circumnavigation and European astronomers were beginning to suspect that the Earth was the centre of nothing. Its glow does not stand still: it oscillates faintly, pulse after pulse, as if the star were breathing very slowly.