The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990 and has provided humanity with a spectacular view of the universe for more than three decades.
Not celebrating its 31st birthday, NASA has released a spectacular new image of a star that emits bubbles of burning gas. Astronomers at the Space Telescope Institute noticed the powerful observations of AG Carinae, one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way. The star is a bright blue variable and very fickle. It experiences wild pulsations, occasional large-scale stimuli, and occasional massive eruptions.
This activity created a huge nebula of material that was expelled over a period of about 5 light-years. These illuminated blue variables are larger stars that live faster and die younger, which is very different from most stars in our galaxy. AG Carina is 70 times the mass of our Sun and 1 million times more illuminated.
Kerstin Weis, a luminous blue variable expert at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, said in a statement, “I like to study these kinds of stars because I’m fascinated by their instability. They’re doing weird things.” Hubble observed 1.5 million of about 48,000 celestial objects. More than 169 terabytes of data collected by observers led to the publication of 18,000 scientific research papers last year alone.
AG Carina is about 20,000 light-years away, so it is difficult to see with the naked eye despite the brightness. The visible circumference of the nebula this image contains about five light-years, which were captured in both visible and ultraviolet spectra. From this point of view, our closest star is Proxima Centauri, about 4.2 light-years away. Current technology will take many thousands of years to reach this star, and the AG Carina cloud is even bigger. The star itself is at the center of the image, one of the elements protruding around it is lo ago carina that formed that nebula about 10,000 years ago during increased instability.
This is to be expected for rare “illuminated blue variable” stars. By all means, the AG Carina remains a million times brighter than our Sun, and the solar wind travels at a speed of 670,000 miles per hour (one million km / h). The red component of the figure is intersected with hydrogen nitrogen. You will see a bubble of this gas extending outwards from the top left of the figure. The star’s solar wind was able to punch a hole in the cocoon there, allowing the gas to escape into space. Blue vortices are clusters of stars and reflect light from the stars.
