Eta Carinae, three million suns worth

[HysteryDiagnosis]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/tag/supernova/



A remarkable stellar event that mesmerized astronomers in 1843 may have been a previously unknown kind of explosion, researchers say. That explosion, which made the star Eta Carinae one of the brightest in the Southern sky, could have been the precursor to the star’s expected explosion into a supernova.
Researchers began watching Eta Carinae after the star mysteriously brightened 1843, and astronomers in recent decades have photographed and studied the resulting cloud of gas and dust, known as the Homunculus Nebula, that billows away from the star. A farther-out faint shell of debris from an earlier explosion is also visible, probably dating from around 1,000 years ago. “Looking at other galaxies, astronomers have seen stars like Eta Carinae that get brighter, but not quite as bright as a real supernova,” said Nathan Smith…. “We don’t know what they are. It’s an enduring mystery as to what can brighten a star that much without destroying it completely” .



http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/tag/supernova/
Second-Brightest Star Ever Detected Shines Like 3 Million Suns



Astronomers have discovered that a massive star known as the Peony Nebula star ranks as the second-brightest in our Milky Way galaxy. The astronomers estimate that the star shines 3.2 million times as brightly as our sun, which is enough to get it a galactic silver medal; the brightest star ever detected is Eta Carinae, which is 4.7 million times brighter than our own little star.

Mebbe Sveneric Johansson has it right.

"As if its huffing and puffing behavior weren't weird enough, Eta Carina also appears to be a Death Star powerful enough to make Darth Vader turn in his light saber. Sveneric Johansson, a specialist in atomic spectroscopy at the University of Lund in Sweden, has proposed that Eta Carinae also is acting as a massive ultraviolet laser. Johansson, using Hubble observations made with the Goddard High-Resolubon Spectrograph, reported in 1996 that his interpretation is not yet proven, but that it appears to be the most plausible explanation of the data."

[neverforget]

1. Thanks for the articles. Our star is so puny compared to them.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

2. Well you may want to take a look over here as well....

http://www.holoscience.com/news/eta_carina.htm


A Hubble Space Telescope image of Eta Carina is shown scaled to fit within the much larger X-ray nebula discovered by Chandra. The lobes are as wide as our solar system and expanding in opposite directions away from a central bright disk at speeds in excess of 1 million km/h (600,000 mph). The odd shape is believed to be partly due to the star's intense magnetic field channeling plasma.

"It is not what I expected," said Dr. Fred Seward of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The new X-ray observation shows three distinct structures: an outer, horseshoe-shaped ring about 2 light years in diameter, a hot inner core about 3 light-months in diameter, and a hot central source less than 1 light-month in diameter which may contain the superstar that drives the whole show. The outer ring provides evidence of another large explosion that occurred over 1,000 years ago.

All three structures are thought to represent shock waves produced by matter rushing away from the superstar at supersonic speeds. The temperature of the shock-heated gas ranges from 60 million deg Kelvin in the central regions to 3 million K (108 million deg. F to 5.4 million deg. F) on the outer structure.

Since it looked like a supernova, one naturally would assume that was the end of the star. All that should be left are beautiful nebula and, perhaps, a neutron star or black hole where the original star once stood. Instead, Eta Cannae is still there (in a subtle bit of grammar, astronomers refer to the star as Eta Carinae and the nebula as Eta Carina).

[Ricochet21]

4. I agree

I agree

[Posteritatis]

3. Eta Carinae's pretty damned neat and I'm glad it's aimed away from us for when it finally blows. nt