Eta Carinae -

Super Sharp Hubble Space Telescope View of Eta Carinae

Eta Carinae was the site of a giant outburst about 150 years ago, when it

became one of the brightest stars in the southern sky. Though the star

released as much visible light as a supernova explosion, it survived the

outburst. Somehow, the explosion produced two polar lobes and a large thin

equatorial disk, all moving outward at about 1.5 million miles per hour.

The new observation shows that excess violet light escapes along the

equatorial plane between the bipolar lobes. Apparently there is relatively

little dusty debris between the lobes down by the star; most of the blue light

is able to escape. The lobes, on the other hand, contain large amounts of dust

which preferentially absorb blue light, causing the lobes to appear reddish.

This image is also available as

SEDS also presents the

The furious expansion of a huge, billowing pair of gas and dust clouds are

captured in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope comparison image of the

supermassive star Eta Carinae.

To create the picture, astronomers aligned and subtracted two images of Eta

Carinae taken 17 months apart (April 1994, September 1995). Black represents

where the material was located in the older image, and white represents the

more recent location.

(The light and dark streaks that make an ‘X’ pattern are instrumental

artifacts caused by the extreme brightness of the central star. The bright

white region at the center of the image results from the star and its

immediate surroundings being ‘saturated’ in one of the images.)

This difference image shows that material closer into the star (which is the

bright blob at the image’s center) is blasting into space more quickly than

material farther from the star.

This image may be obtained as

Photo Credit: Jon Morse (University of Colorado), and NASA