hip-48527

Its story

In Vela beats a blue-tinted, variable star of B type whose light reaches us after more than twenty-two hundred years of travel. It set out in classical antiquity, when Greek astronomers like Hipparchus were tracing the first serious star catalogues. Far hotter and more luminous than the Sun, it shifts brightness with its own rhythm, like a slow lighthouse. It is one of those oscillating embers hanging from the rigging of the old celestial vessel, a light so ancient that it still remembered Alexandria when it set out towards us.