hip-4440

Its story

In the unmistakable zigzag of Cassiopeia, some 538 light years away, a blue B-type star shines with all the vigour of stellar youth. Its light departed around 1488, only a few years before Columbus's first voyage to the American continent and the fall of Granada. Far hotter than the Sun, it casts that bluish-white blaze that betrays the extreme temperatures at its surface. The mythical queen, chained into the celestial W, offers one of her slopes as a stage, granting it company among her better-known stars.