Light echos in the Eta Carinae Nebula

The young star Eta Carinae shines prominently in the skies of the southern hemisphere. Although located relatively far away from Earth (about seven thousand light-years away, as compared with the average distance of naked-eye stars of about a thousand light-years), it can be seen easily by people in the southern hemisphere because it is fantastically bright—about five million times more luminous than our Sun. Astronomers have suggested one reason it is so bright is because it is very massive – perhaps as much as 200 times more massive than our Sun, making it one of the most massive stars known. (Massive stars consume their hydrogen much more quickly than Sun-like stars and are hotter and brighter.)

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Credit: IRAC-NASA, Smith et al. 2018

false-color infrared image of nebulosity near the massive flaring star Eta Carinae. The small white circle highlights an "echo" - a bright cloudlet that has recently lit up as shocks from the eruption of the star (located off the top of the image) pass through. Astronomers date the eruption producing this bright cloudlet to the Great Eruption of 1837 and argue from the spectra that the flare was probably due to a triple-star merger event. Other figure labels relate to the model geometry and the IRAC camera filters.

\Source / Image Courtesy

ESA's XMM-Newton has spotted surprising changes in the powerful streams of gas from two massive stars in the binary star system HD 5980. One of the two stars had a major outburst reminiscent of the 19th-century eruption of Eta Carinae, and astronomers expected that its X-ray emission would fade gently over the years.

Instead, they found the pair was two and a half times brighter than a decade earlier, and its X-ray emission was even more energetic, suggesting that colliding stellar winds don’t behave as expected

Eta Carinae is a binary system containing the most luminous and massive star within 10,000 light-years. A long-term study led by astronomers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, combined data from NASA satellites, ground-based observing campaigns and theoretical modeling to produce the most comprehensive picture of Eta Carinae to date.

New findings include Hubble Space Telescope images that show decade-old shells of ionized gas racing away from the largest star at a million miles an hour, and new 3-D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars' interactions.

The spectacular star-forming Carina Nebula has been captured in great detail by the VLT Survey Telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory.