INDOZONE.ID – a star which exploded nearly 200 years ago to become bright can now be seen in great detail through multi-wavelength visuals.
In a new video, a team of scientists created a three-dimensional model of the Homunculus Nebula around the star Eta Carinae, which could give us some insight into this extraordinary event.
As Sciencealert reports, the binary star system Eta Carinae began erupting in the late 1830s and became one of the the brightest star in the sky for many years in the early 1840s.
The gas and dust that this eruption ejected into the space around the binary is known as the Homunculus Nebula, the impact of which makes the star no longer visible to the naked eye.
The striking double -pointed shape of the Homunculus Nebula can help us better understand the eruption of massive binary stars and how the nebula spreads through space.
Only 7,500 light years away, the star is one of the closest examples of our solar system Bima Sakti, so we can learn more about it.
The new models are a continuation of this investigation into the giant structure.
Observations through the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes have revealed details of the radiation impact through ultraviolet light, and X-rays.
The Spitzer Space Telescope has provided an infrared image of the wider Carina Nebula so that it can be reconstructed more thoroughly.
“The team did an excellent job representing the volumetric layers so that the public can immediately intuitively understand the complex structure around the star Eta Car,” said astronomer Frank Summers, principal visualization scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI).
“We were not only able to tell the story of the Great Eruption, but also feature nebulae generated through 3D visuals.”
Because this region of stars is so dusty, it is difficult to get a very detailed picture of the stars themselves.
We know that there are at least two stars, both blue giants.
One is about 100 times the mass of the Sun, the other is between 30 and 80 times the mass of the Sun. They orbit each other once every 5.5 years.
Such stars are short-lived and will erupt periodically throughout their short lives.
But the Great Eruption of the 1840s was more akin to a supernova, leading astronomers to think the system was originally trinary, and perhaps the explosion was the result of two stars out of three colliding and merging.
That would shed some light on some amazing questions about our solar system, including how one star might be so much more massive than another.
Currently, Eta Carinae is once again visible to the naked eye (depending on the level of light pollution).
Astronomers believe that the stars collided in a massive supernova event, which in turn could result in a stellar-mass black hole.
Given that we don’t know much about the stars themselves, the future of binary stars is difficult to predict.
This means that Eta Carinae can not only help us understand massive stars, but also be a window of knowledge to understand the oddities of massive binaries that are positioned close together.
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