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 the star had about 200 years ago.
And when these massive stars are near the end of their life,
they become quite unstable.
And there was this tremendous eruption that blew off 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, but this brightening
only lasted a number of years and 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 on the earth all come from.
Stars like this supernova 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.