hip-58103

Its story

It is a white A-type star, flagged as luminous in Centaurus, which suggests appreciable intrinsic power. Its light took hundreds of thousands of years to arrive: it set out long before writing, agriculture or any human civilisation existed, in an age when the first modern hominins were barely emerging in Africa. The exact figure matters less than the vertigo: what now brushes the observer crossed entire eras.