Sargas

Its story

Sargas shines in the tail of the Scorpion, a luminous F-type giant lying 300 light-years away. Its name, drawn from a very old Sumerian root, has travelled through civilisations almost as long as its own light. It accompanies Shaula as one of the two stingers that close the celestial scorpion, a constellation the Babylonians already deemed ominous and which marked the turning of the year for Polynesian navigators. Its pale yellow tint betrays a temperature close to the Sun's, but a far greater girth.