Heze

Its story

Heze occupies the quiet centre of Virgo, one of the largest constellations in the zodiac, as a white A-type star just over 74 light-years away. No grand legends cling to it: its name, of uncertain origin, survived by inertia through Arabic and medieval European catalogues without anyone quite knowing why. Perhaps that anonymity is its beauty — a clean, young, unscripted light that set out around 1952, when astronomy was just beginning to chart the sky in radio frequencies.