Imai

Its story

Imai is a blue class-B star lying 345 light-years away, one of the corners that trace the Southern Cross. Its brightness is not perfectly steady: it belongs to a family of variables that pulse on hourly timescales, oscillations so subtle they only emerged with modern photometry. In the southern sky it works as a geographic anchor, alongside Acrux, Becrux and Gacrux, helping to point the gaze toward the celestial south pole where no polar star stands guard.