Iot

Its story

One of the most thoroughly studied pulsating stars in Hercules: a blue-white B3 IV that beats in two distinct modes at once — the rapid drum of Beta Cephei variables and the slower swell of slowly pulsating B stars. That double personality has turned it into an asteroseismology laboratory, the discipline that listens to a star's interior the way a stethoscope listens to a heart. Bound to an unseen companion that orbits it every 111 days, its blue light takes about 455 years to reach us.