hip-59173

Its story

Deep in the southern Centaur burns a blue-white star whose brightness refuses to stay still: it pulses with a slow, breathing rhythm. Its light took some 438 years to reach us, leaving when Galileo first aimed his small telescope at the night sky over Padua. A young, massive sun —hotter and far more luminous than ours— wraps its atmosphere in shifting veils of ionised hydrogen.