hip-81702

Its story

In the southern Altar burns a colossal blue O-class star, one of the catalogue's rarest and most violent creatures, whose light —if we take its most extreme distance— has been travelling for over three hundred thousand years: it set out when the first modern hominids had not yet crossed Africa. Tens of times more massive and thousands of times more luminous than the Sun, it lives fast and will burn briefly. It is a cosmic flare turned into an extragalactic beacon of sheer beauty.