"Inside the Image // Hubble Space Telescope // Eta Carinae"
This is an image of Eta Carinae taken with the Hubble Space Telescope and there's a lot going on
in this image. If you go down into the very center of this image you can see this bright spot here,
that's actually two stars much, much more massive than the Sun that are in orbit around one another.
So what you see here are these two lobes of material and they are from a giant eruption
that this star had about 200 years ago and when these massive stars are near the ends of their
life they become quite unstable, and there was this tremendous eruption that blew up about
20 times the mass of the Sun, and there was a massive brightening of the star, became one of
the brightest stars in the sky in the 1840s, and what we see here is the result of that massive
eruption, and these lobes of material that are slowly making their way out into Interstellar
space. Mariners at the time used it as a navigation aid, this brightening only lasted
a number of years and then it since faded but Eta Carinae is still a relatively bright star.
The dust in this homunculus nebula, which is what it's called, is going to continue
to expand it's being illuminated by the stars that are interior to it.
Here's another image of Eta Carinae taken with Hubble, it looks a little different.
Hubble Is outfitted with very specialized filters that can see the light emitted from
specific atoms at specific wavelengths, the blue shows you where the magnesium
is emitting light, the red shows regions where nitrogen is emitting light they
have different ionization states they respond to this ultraviolet light in different ways.
One of the things that happens in these massive stars is they're factories for heavier elements
and that's where the heavy elements in our bodies and the Earth all come from stars like this
supernovae and massive stars that process them and eject the material back out into space, and that's
sort of the hard work that astronomers want to do because we want to understand all the details of
what's happening in this nebula that's what these extraordinary eyes that Hubble has allow us to do.
This is a very complex and volatile object and in fact one of the reasons for being interested
is that on the list of stars that we know about in the Milky Way that may soon become supernovae
this is one of them. It takes about 8000 years for the light from Eta Carinae to reach us and
so it could already have gone supernova 8000 years ago and we wouldn't know it.
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