hip-49220

Its story

In Leo, the lion's constellation, blazes a blue B-type star whose light has been crossing space for nearly a thousand years. When it set out, Islamic astronomers in Toledo and Baghdad were compiling the so-called Toledan Tables, the basis of eclipse calculations for centuries. Very hot and massive, several times more luminous than the Sun, it is a young incandescent star that lives fast. Its blue-white glow belongs to an era when Europe measured the heavens thanks to wisdom inherited from the Islamic world.