V4334 Sgr

V4334 Sagittarii

Sakurai's Object

V4334 SGR is well known as "Sakurai's Object". It was discovered as a variable on February 20, 1996 by Yukio Sakurai of Japan while he was looking for comets. (Imagine the numbers of variables discovered this way!) At the time, it was a new 12th magnitude star thought to be a novae. But pretty soon it was realized things were not quite so simple.