Eta Carinae tagged posts

This spectacular image of the Carina nebula reveals the dynamic cloud of interstellar matter and thinly spread gas and dust as never before. The massive stars in the interior of this cosmic bubble emit intense radiation that causes the surrounding gas to glow. By contrast, other regions of the nebula contain dark pillars of dust cloaking newborn stars.
Credit: ESO/J. Emerson/M. Irwin/J. Lewis

VISTA gazes into one of the largest nebulae in the Milky Way in infrared. About 7500 light-years away, in the constellation of Carina, lies a nebula within which stars form and perish side-by-side. Shaped by these dramatic events, the Carina Nebula is a dynamic, evolving cloud of thinly spread interstellar gas and dust.

The massive stars in the interior of this cosmic bubble emit intense radiation that...

Color image taken with the Hubble Space Telecope’s WFPC2 camera, showing the dumbbell-shaped cloud of gas and dust around the star. This nebula contains more than 10 times the mass of our Sun, which was ejected by Eta Carinae in the 19th century Great Eruption.
Credit: N. Smith (U. Arizona) and NASA.

Observations from the Gemini South and other telescopes in Chile played a critical role in understanding light echoes from a stellar eruption which occurred almost 200 years ago. Gemini spectroscopy shows that ejected material from the blast is the fastest ever seen from a star that remained intact. Imagine traveling to the Moon in just 20 seconds! That’s how fast material from a 170 year old stellar eruption sped away from the unstable, eruptive, and extremely massive star Eta Carinae.

Astro...

Eta Carinae’s Homunculus nebula. Right: Zooming in by 500 times, the new high-resolution image of the heart of Eta Carinae showing the collision between the two winds. This region is about 100 times larger than the diameter of each of the two stars. The yellow ellipse is the binary orbit. The two red dots indicate the positions of the two stars at the time of observation. Credit: ESO (left) and Gerd Weigelt (right).

A revolutionary study involving Max Planck Institute for Radioastronomy (MPIfR) in Germany, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, and NASA, has obtained the sharpest ever images of one of the heaviest stars in our Galaxy. The images show Eta Carinae and its violent collision of winds in stunning detail, providing new information on how stars evolve and die...

This is an artist’s impression of the clash of powerful stellar winds. Credit: NASA/C. Reed

The new source confirmed that binary systems with strong colliding stellar winds comprise a separate new population of high-energy gamma-ray sources. Massive binary star systems with highly luminous and hot Wolf-Rayet stars and massive (tens solar masses) OB companion generate strong stellar winds. Its percussion may lead to producing a fierce photon flux with an energetic potential of >100 MEV, when a distance separating stars is relatively short. That phenomenon was considered a possible source of gamma-radiation for a long while.

Though such radiation was detected only once, with the famous Eta Carinae when one of its stars underwebt an explosion and for some time was the most luminous star in th...