Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Danse Macabre
It looks like heaven is hell after all.
This whirl of dancing ghouls is a picture of Eta Carinae, a huge dying star some 10,000 light years away from the Earth. The image taken by NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope shows the convulsing star ripping to shreds its mother, the Carina Nebula, which bore it some 3 million years ago. The star is one of the Milky Way's most massive star. It's so huge, some 100 times more massive than the Sun, that it can barely hold itself together. Yet it's also one of the galaxy's youngest stars. The Sun, for example, is 4.5 billion years old.
Over the last 200 years, the star has been expelling material into space. In 1837, it flared to hundreds of times its normal brightness and disgorged about two percent of its total mass, enough to form two Suns, astronomers from the University of Texas said. NASA said that Eta Carninae might die in a supernova blast within our lifetime.
But Eta Carninae has already spawned its progeny. Burts of powerful ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds triggered by the star's paroxyms ripped apart the surrounding gas and dust and "shocked" new stars into being, NASA said. "When massive stars like these are born, they rapidly begin to shred to pieces the very cloud that nurtured them, forcing gas and dust to clump together and collapse into new stars. The process continues to spread outward, triggering successive generations of fewer and fewer stars. Our own Sun may have grown up in a similar environment."
The agency explained that "the new Spitzer image offers astronomers a detailed 'family tree' of the Carina Nebula. At the top of the hierarchy are the grandparents, Eta Carinae and its siblings, and below them are the generations of progeny of different sizes and ages."
(The false colors in the Spitzer picture correspond to different infrared wavelength, NASA said. Red represents dust features and green shows hot gas. Embryonic stars are yellow or white and foreground stars are blue. Eta Carinae itself lies just off the top of image. It is too bright for infrared telescopes to observe.)
This whirl of dancing ghouls is a picture of Eta Carinae, a huge dying star some 10,000 light years away from the Earth. The image taken by NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope shows the convulsing star ripping to shreds its mother, the Carina Nebula, which bore it some 3 million years ago. The star is one of the Milky Way's most massive star. It's so huge, some 100 times more massive than the Sun, that it can barely hold itself together. Yet it's also one of the galaxy's youngest stars. The Sun, for example, is 4.5 billion years old.
Over the last 200 years, the star has been expelling material into space. In 1837, it flared to hundreds of times its normal brightness and disgorged about two percent of its total mass, enough to form two Suns, astronomers from the University of Texas said. NASA said that Eta Carninae might die in a supernova blast within our lifetime.
But Eta Carninae has already spawned its progeny. Burts of powerful ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds triggered by the star's paroxyms ripped apart the surrounding gas and dust and "shocked" new stars into being, NASA said. "When massive stars like these are born, they rapidly begin to shred to pieces the very cloud that nurtured them, forcing gas and dust to clump together and collapse into new stars. The process continues to spread outward, triggering successive generations of fewer and fewer stars. Our own Sun may have grown up in a similar environment."
The agency explained that "the new Spitzer image offers astronomers a detailed 'family tree' of the Carina Nebula. At the top of the hierarchy are the grandparents, Eta Carinae and its siblings, and below them are the generations of progeny of different sizes and ages."
(The false colors in the Spitzer picture correspond to different infrared wavelength, NASA said. Red represents dust features and green shows hot gas. Embryonic stars are yellow or white and foreground stars are blue. Eta Carinae itself lies just off the top of image. It is too bright for infrared telescopes to observe.)
