Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) tagged posts

This four-panel graphic illustrates how the binary-star system V Hydrae is launching balls of plasma into space. Credit: NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star. The plasma balls are zooming so fast through space it would take only 30 minutes for them to travel from Earth to the moon. This stellar “cannon fire” has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 400 years, astronomers estimate. The fireballs present a puzzle to astronomers, because the ejected material could not have been shot out by the host star, V Hydrae, a ed giant, 1,200 light-years away, which has probably shed at least half of its mass into space during its death throes...