hip-87044

Its story

In Hercules, the kneeling hero of the summer sky, shines a white A-type star, hotter and more luminous than the Sun. Its light took some 467 years to reach us: it set out around 1559, in the midst of the Protestant Reformation, while Philip II was consolidating the Spanish Empire and Europe was reorganising itself religiously and politically. That cold, clean spark traces today one of the flanks of the celestial demigod.