Astronomers blown away by historic stellar blast

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.

Astronomers conclude that this is the fastest jettisoned gas ever measured from a stellar outburst that didn't result in the complete annihilation of the star.

The blast, from the most luminous star known in our galaxy, released almost as much energy as a typical supernova explosion that would have left behind a stellar corpse. However, in this case a double-star system remained and played a critical role in the circumstances that led to the colossal blast.

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Credit: Gemini Observatory

This sequence of images show's an artist's conception of the expanding blast wave from Eta Carinae's 1843 eruption.

The first image shows the star as it may have appeared before the eruption, as a hot blue supergiant star surrounded by an older shell of gas that was ejected in a previous outburst about 1,000 years ago.

Then in 1843, Eta Carinae suffered its explosive giant outburst, which created the well-known two-lobed "Homunculus" nebula, plus a fast shock wave porpagating ahead of the Homunculus.

New evidence for this fast material is reported here. As time procedes, both the faster shock wave and the denser Homunculus nebula expand and fill the interior of the old shell.

Eventually, we see that the faster blast wave begins to catch-up with and overtake parts of the older shell, producing a bright fireworks display that heats the older shell.


Source / Image Courtesy

A team of astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) at ESO’s Paranal Observatory to take a unique image of the Eta Carinae star system in the Carina Nebula.

This colossal binary system consists of two massive stars orbiting each other and is very active, producing stellar winds which travel at velocities of up to ten million kilometres per hour