Hubble grabs colorful photo of rare star on the brink of destruction

To celebrate the 31st anniversary of the launch of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have pointed the observatory on a “famous star” who “is fighting a fierce struggle between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction.” , this star, called AG Carinae, is one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way and is surrounded by a luminous halo of gas and dust that results in “living on the edge”.

The captured image of AG Carinae, which you can see below, is a “composite of separate exposures acquired by the WFC3 / UVIS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Several filters were used to sample ranges of lengths. narrow wave. Color results from assigning different tints (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. “

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, STScl

The expanding shell of gas and dust surrounding this star is about five light years wide and was created by “one of the most giant eruptions around 10,000 years ago.” This expelled matter represents nearly 10 times the mass of our sun.

This is a typical activity for a rare race of stars called the Luminous Blue Variable, a star that “lives fast and dies young.” They only live a few million years, which is a short lifespan compared to the lifespan of around 10 billion years for those like our sun.

AG Carinae is also up to 70 times the size of our sun and “shines with the blinding glow of a million suns”.

These explosions only occur once or twice in the life of a bright blue variable, and only occur when the star is in danger of self-destructing as a supernova.

The red material in the image is glowing hydrogen gas mixed with nitrogen gas, while the material highlighted in blue are “dust clusters illuminated by reflected light from the star” which are shaped by the star. stellar wind.

Fun facts about the Hubble Space Telescope

At the end of the article, NASA shared some information about the Hubble Space Telescope, including the fact that it was launched on April 24, 1990 and made over 1.5 million observations on approximately 48,000 objects. celestial during his life.

It has made more than 181,000 orbits around the Earth, which is equivalent to more than 4.5 billion miles, and its observations have produced more than 169 terabytes of data. These data have led to more than 18,000 scientific articles, 900 of which were published in 2020.

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Adam Bankhurst is a news editor for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.