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Its story

It lives in Crux, the small Southern Cross that guides voyagers across the southern hemisphere, and shines with the deep blue of the hottest B-class stars. Its light set out about twelve hundred years ago, just as Charlemagne had been crowned emperor and Latin Christendom was reshaping an unprecedented political order. It is a variable wrapped in a disk of gas —proof of its dizzying rotation— and outshines the Sun by thousands of times. Few stars conceal such violence beneath so delicate an appearance.