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Its story

In the small, discreet Antlia —the Pneumatic Pump devised by Lacaille in the eighteenth century— shines a blue, variable B-type star. Its light took two thousand six hundred fifty-two years to reach us: it departed around the seventh century BCE, when the Ionian philosophers —Thales, Anaximander— were inaugurating Greek rational thought in Miletus. Hot and far more luminous than the Sun, it pulses with shifting brightness, true to the restlessness of great stars.