Posted on 07/02/2019 10:12:43 AM PDT by Red Badger
Each new image of Eta Carinae reveals new subtle details, streams of light and filaments of gas and dust, that astronomers hadn't observed before. Photo by Hubble/NASA/ESA
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July 1 (UPI) -- The Hubble Space Telescope has captured Eta Carinae's fireworks in red, white and blue, just in time for Independence Day.
Eta Carinae is a binary star system located 7,500 light-years away in the Carina constellation. One of its two stars, which orbit each other, is large, highly unstable and nearing the end of its life. The dynamic stellar duo occasionally produces violent outbursts.
The system's most famous outburst occurred in 1838. In the wake of the eruption, the stars gradually brightened. By 1844, Eta Carinae was the second brightest star in the night sky.
The duo's time on top was short-lived, but the system remains a favorite target for astronomers. The 19th century outburst is still visible in the form of the dumbbell-shaped clouds of gas and dust.
Over the last quarter-century, Hubble has used nearly its entire arsenal of instruments to image the star system and surrounding nebula.
The newest ultraviolet portrait revealed a new luminous magnesium structure hiding between the the two dumbbells, filaments energized by the collisions between the waves of gas and dust ejected by the star system over millions of years.
"We've discovered a large amount of warm gas that was ejected in the Great Eruption but hasn't yet collided with the other material surrounding Eta Carinae," Nathan Smith, an astronomer with the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona and lead investigator of the Hubble program, said in a news release. "Most of the emission is located where we expected to find an empty cavity. This extra material is fast, and it 'ups the ante' in terms of the total energy of an already powerful stellar blast." RELATED Solar winds, polar heat explains Jupiter's warming atmosphere
By studying the movement of gas and dust in the nebula, evidence of previous eruptions, scientists hope to unravel the mystery of how the Great Eruption began. Each new ultraviolet image of the star system and surrounding nebula reveals new structural intricacies, details that might help astronomers better understand the dynamics at play inside Eta Carinae.
"We had used Hubble for decades to study Eta Carinae in visible and infrared light, and we thought we had a pretty full account of its ejected debris. But this new ultraviolet-light image looks astonishingly different, revealing gas we did not see in either visible-light or infrared images," Smith said. "We're excited by the prospect that this type of ultraviolet magnesium emission may also expose previously hidden gas in other types of objects that eject material, such as protostars or other dying stars; and only Hubble can take these kinds of pictures."
Looks like a big oops in space.
Videos of fireworks usually have a technical delay challenge to synchronize the sound with the picture.
The sound here will come after we’ve been dead for a gazillion years.
There is no sound in space..................
I can’t hear you ... is there space between you and me ?
In outer space no one can hear you scream..........................
There is no sound in space..................
*************
That’s only for if you’re trying to scream.
ping
Old movie promo line: In space, no one can hear you scream.
Just to demonstrate the incredible optical power that made that picture possible, here is a picture of Eta Carinae in its surrounding environment (it's near on the horizontal centerline of the picture, about two-thirds of the way from the vertical centerline to the left edge, directly under the letter 'I' in the word MOSAIC2 at picture's upper left):
The line labeled "3 arcminutes" (at upper right) is about one-tenth the apparent diameter of the full moon as seen from Earth.
Little Johnny Q plays with matches
So the entire picture is about the length of the Kessel Run?
Yeah, like someone finally got the cold fusion cell tuned to exactly the right frequency, after years of thankless effort.
One of my big sailing goals is to get far enough south to see this in a telescope. It won’t look the same, but, I still want to see it.
Very large stars, 100 solar mass or more, tend to blow off outer layers due to their overall brightness, before finally going supernova. This limits the maximum size of stars as well as their lifespans. Small stars live trillions of years, longer than the current age of the universe. Eta Carinae will only live a few million.
So, it's NOT SUV's???
The brightest stars were designated by letters of the Greek alphabet, in order of apparent brightness. (Sometimes they got it wrong--Beta Orionis is brighter than Alpha Orionis, for example.) The designations were made before Argo broke up, so Eta Carinae was perceived to be the seventh-brightest star in all of Argo, not the seventh-brightest star in Carina.
Did it sink?...................
Technological civilizations develop until they get their big honkin’ particle accelerator/collider working at peak efficiency ...
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