Indonesiainside.id, Washington—Just in time for Halloween, the Hubble Space Telescope has captured this sinister image of a star surrounded by soot. The star, a crimson giant named CW Leonis, appears to be embedded in an orange spider web.
The image shows sunlight penetrating the carbon soot surrounding the star, which is running out of fuel. You can zoom in on the spooky star in this video. “Carbon is cooked in the core of stars as a waste product of nuclear fusion,” the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) wrote in a statement, noting that CW Leonis emits carbon-filled soot as fuel supplies run low.
The crimson star is known as CW Leonis and has a ‘terrible glow’ that radiates through space.
“The crimson giant photo of CW Leonis looks like something out of a Halloween story,” NASA said in a statement.
CW Leonis is the closest carbon star to Earth, shining at a distance of about 400 light-years — about 100 times the distance of the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. The star is at a final stage of life where it has shifted from combining hydrogen in the core, as the sun does, to combining it in its outer layers.
NASA says the red giant’s life stage gives it a “second lease”; studying such stars could also allow us to predict how our own sun will behave at the end of its lifetime, billions of years from now. The sun combines hydrogen in its core for now, but in the future it will run out of hydrogen and the star will begin to collapse.
Eventually, the plasma or superheated gas surrounding the core will heat up and allow hydrogen to coalesce once more in the outer layer, expanding the sun’s ability to generate heat before eventually running out of fuel, peeling off the gaseous layer and leaving a cooling core known as a white dwarf.
Hubble has studied the star several times over the last 20 years or so. “The complex inner structure of the shell and arc was probably formed by the star’s magnetic field. Detailed Hubble observations of CW Leonis taken over the past two decades also show the expansion of the ejected material thread around the star,” NASA notes. (NE)
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