hip-83336

Its story

Submerged in the stinger of Scorpius, this hot blue B-type star burns with an intensity that humbles the Sun. Its light set out about 450 years ago, when Cervantes was finishing Don Quixote and Galileo was refining his spyglass in Padua. It belongs to that family of stellar embers whose surface temperatures climb past twenty thousand degrees. Looking at it is like receiving a late-Renaissance message written in violet light, sent through the very heart of the Scorpion.