Item from dark-forest by
An unremarkable star fifty light-years from Earth — the first one Luo Ji named in his broadcast and the first one the dark forest answered.
187J3X1 is the experimental subject. Luo Ji selected it because it had no known planetary system worth mourning, broadcast its coordinates through the Sun, and waited. Decades later a relativistic projectile — what humans named a 'photoid' — struck the star and detonated it. The event proved that the dark forest exists, that the spell works, and that the cost of being heard in interstellar space is annihilation. Trisolaris stopped joking about Luo Ji within hours of the observation reaching Earth.
A yellow main-sequence star catalog-numbered without distinction in human astronomy. Visible only through telescopes. Its destruction, observed in Year 197 of the Crisis Era, appeared as an abrupt brightening followed by a vast expanding cloud of stellar material.
Also known as: the Test Star, Luo Ji's Star