hip-52742

Its story

In Vela —the sail of the ancient ship Argo— blazes a blue-white B-class star whose light departed around 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral first set foot on the coast of Brazil. Its surface, tens of thousands of degrees hotter than the Sun's, radiates a fierce glacial glare. A companion of the deep southern sky, it is one of those massive, short-lived stars that live quickly and leave a luminous trail far out of scale with their age.