hip-53762

Its story

In Vela —the ancient sails of the Argo dismembered by modern cartographers— shines a blue star whose light took three hundred and five years to reach us. It set out as refracting telescopes were beginning to reveal Saturn’s rings in finer detail. It is a young, hot sun, several times more vehement than our own; its surface above twenty thousand degrees explains that crisp, almost icy blue. It belongs to the rich southern tapestry, where modern constellations coexist with the myths inherited from the Greeks.