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"Inside the Image // Hubble Space Telescope // Eta Carinae"

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This is an image of Eta Carinae taken with the 
Hubble Space Telescope and there's a lot going on  

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in this image. If you go down into the very center 
of this image you can see this bright spot here,  

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that's actually two stars much, much more massive 
than the Sun that are in orbit around one another. 

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So what you see here are these two lobes of 
material and they are from a giant eruption  

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that this star had about 200 years ago and when 
these massive stars are near the ends of their  

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life they become quite unstable, and there was 
this tremendous eruption that blew up about  

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20 times the mass of the Sun. and there was a 
massive brightening of the star, became one of  

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the brightest stars in the sky in the 1840s, and 
what we see here is the result of that massive  

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eruption, and these lobes of material that are 
slowly making their way out into Interstellar  

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space. Mariners at the time used it as a 
navigation aid, this brightening only lasted  

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a number of years and then it since faded but 
Eta Carinae is still a relatively bright star.  

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The dust in this homunculus nebula, which 
is what it's called, is going to continue  

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to expand it's being illuminated by 
the stars that are interior to it.

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Here's another image of Eta Carinae taken 
with Hubble, it looks a little different.  

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Hubble Is outfitted with very specialized 
filters that can see the light emitted from  

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specific atoms at specific wavelengths, 
the blue shows you where the magnesium  

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is emitting light, the red shows regions 
where nitrogen is emitting light they  

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have different ionization states they respond 
to this ultraviolet light in different ways.  

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One of the things that happens in these massive 
stars is they're factories for heavier elements  

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and that's where the heavy elements in our bodies 
and the Earth all come from stars like this  

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supernovae and massive stars that process them and 
eject the material back out into space, and that's  

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sort of the hard work that astronomers want to do 
because we want to understand all the details of  

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what's happening in this nebula that's what these 
extraordinary eyes that Hubble has allow us to do.  

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This is a very complex and volatile object and 
in fact one of the reasons for being interested  

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is that on the list of stars that we know about 
in the Milky Way that may soon become supernovae  

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this is one of them. It takes about 8000 years 
for the light from Eta Carinae to reach us and  

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so it could already have gone supernova 
8000 years ago and we wouldn't know it.

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