See how Eta Carinae changed over time from 1999 to 2020 in this new time-lapse created from NASA Chandra X-ray Telecope data.
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
Credit: NASA/CXC/A. Hobart
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TechTranscript
00:00 [ Music ]
00:03 Visit Chandra's beautiful universe.
00:06 Eta Carina.
00:08 After taking snapshots for over 20 years
00:13 with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory,
00:16 astronomers have learned important new details
00:18 about an eruption from Eta Carina, witnessed on Earth
00:21 in the middle of the 19th century.
00:24 Chandra data from 1999, 2003, 2009, 2014, and 2020 have been combined
00:34 into a new movie of Eta Carina.
00:37 Astronomers used these Chandra observations along with data
00:40 from ESA's XMM-Newton to watch as the stellar eruption
00:44 from about 180 years ago continues to expand into space.
00:50 Eta Carina is a system that contains two massive stars.
00:54 One of the stars is about 90 times the mass of the sun,
00:57 and the other is about 30 solar masses.
01:00 In the middle of the 19th century, people on Earth watched
01:04 as Eta Carina temporarily became one
01:06 of the brightest stars in the sky.
01:09 During this event, which astronomers call the
01:11 "Great Eruption," Eta Carina ejected between 10
01:14 and 45 times the mass of the sun.
01:17 This material became a dense pair of spherical clouds of gas,
01:21 now known as the Homunculus Nebula,
01:24 on opposite sides of the two stars.
01:26 Fast forward to the 20th century
01:28 when astronomers developed new tools to study Eta Carina.
01:32 About 50 years ago, astronomers used the Einstein Observatory
01:37 to discover a bright ring of X-rays
01:39 around the Homunculus Nebula.
01:41 Later, they looked at it more closely with Chandra.
01:44 The new movie of Chandra observations
01:46 over two decades, plus a deep image generated
01:49 by adding the data together, reveal important hints
01:53 about Eta Carina's volatile history.
01:56 The new data also reveals a faint shell
01:58 of X-rays outside the bright X-ray ring.
02:02 The astronomers associate this shell with a blast wave
02:04 from the Great Eruption.
02:07 Because the newly discovered outer X-ray shell has a similar
02:10 shape and orientation to the Homunculus Nebula,
02:13 the research team think both structures have a common origin.
02:18 The idea is that clumps of material were blasted away
02:21 from Eta Carina well before the mid-1840s Great Eruption,
02:25 sometime between 1200 and 1800.
02:28 Later, the blast wave from the Great Eruption tore
02:31 through space and collided with and heated the clumps
02:34 of material to millions of degrees,
02:37 creating the bright X-ray ring.
02:39 The blast wave has now traveled beyond the bright ring.
02:43 A detailed analysis shows
02:45 that the Great Eruption likely consisted of two explosions.
02:49 First, there was a quick ejection of low-density gas,
02:52 which produced the X-ray blast wave.
02:55 This was followed by the slower ejection of dense gas
02:58 that eventually formed the Homunculus Nebula.
03:02 While Chandra has revealed so much about Eta Carina,
03:05 the story isn't done yet.
03:07 Astronomers are eagerly awaiting the next episode of data
03:11 to find out what happens.
03:13 [ Music ]