What color is Eta Carinae?
blue
Eta Carinae, also called Homunculus Nebula, peculiar red star and nebula about 7,500 light-years from Earth in the southern constellation Carina and now known to be a binary star system. It is one of a small class of stars called luminous blue variables.
Why is Eta Carinae important?
At radio wavelengths Eta Carinae produces the brightest known stellar wind. A recent increase in radio emission has occurred because cool gas close to the star has been excited by a blast of radiation. At infrared wavelengths, Eta and its nebula are the brightest objects in the sky beyond our solar system.
What will happen when Eta Carinae explode?
Fortunately, Eta Carinae is far away, at least7,500 light-years from Earth. If it explodes, most of its energy will bescattered or absorbed in the vast emptiness of space. Cosmic rays would be diffused by magnetic fields, and mostof the damaging light would not affect life on Earth.
What is the Eta Carinae star system?
The Eta Carinae star system is currently one of the most massive stars that can be studied in great detail. Until recently Eta Carinae was thought to be the most massive single star, but the system’s binary nature was proposed by the Brazilian astronomer Augusto Damineli in 1996 and confirmed in 2005.
What is the Eta Carinids meteor shower?
Although unrelated to the star and nebula, the weak Eta Carinids meteor shower has a radiant very close to Eta Carinae. Eta Carinae was first recorded as a fourth-magnitude star in the 16th or 17th centuries. It became the second-brightest star in the sky in the mid-19th century, before fading below naked-eye visibility.
What is the wind behind Eta Carinae B?
Near periastron, as the secondary ploughs through ever denser regions of the primary wind, the colliding wind zone becomes distorted into a spiral trailing behind Eta Carinae B. The wind-wind collision cone separates the winds of the two stars. For 55–75° behind the secondary, there is a thin hot wind typical of O or Wolf–Rayet stars.
What is the s2cid for Eta Carinae?
S2CID 118880932. ^ Corcoran, Michael F.; Ishibashi, Kazunori; Davidson, Kris; Swank, Jean H.; Petre, Robert; Schmitt, Jurgen H. M. M. (1997). “Increasing X-ray emissions and periodic outbursts from the massive star Eta Carinae”. Nature. 390 (6660): 587. Bibcode: 1997Natur.390..587C. doi: 10.1038/37558. S2CID 4431077.