Eta Carinae's Expanding Explosion In 20 Year Time-Lapse
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 Visit Chandra's beautiful universe.
00:05 Eta Carinae
00:10 After taking snapshots for over 20 years with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory,
00:15 astronomers have learned important new details about an eruption from Eta Carinae
00:20 witnessed on Earth in the middle of the 19th century.
00:25 The data from 1999, 2003, 2009, 2014, and 2020
00:33 have been combined into a new movie of Eta Carinae.
00:38 Astronomers used these Chandra observations along with data from ESA's XMM-Newton
00:43 to watch as the stellar eruption from about 180 years ago continues to expand into space.
00:50 Eta Carinae is a system that contains two massive stars.
00:54 One of the stars is about 90 times the mass of the Sun, and the other is about 30 solar masses.
01:00 In the middle of the 19th century, people on Earth watched as Eta Carinae
01:05 temporarily became one of the brightest stars in the sky.
01:09 During this event, which astronomers call the Great Eruption,
01:12 Eta Carinae ejected between 10 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, on opposite sides of the two stars.
01:26 Fast forward to the 20th century, when astronomers developed new tools to study Eta Carinae.
01:32 About 50 years ago, astronomers used the Einstein Observatory
01:36 to discover a bright ring of X-rays around the Homunculus Nebula.
01:41 Later, they looked at it more closely with Chandra.
01:44 The new movie of Chandra observations over two decades,
01:47 plus a deep image generated by adding the data together,
01:51 reveal important hints about Eta Carinae's volatile history.
01:55 The new data also reveals a faint shell of X-rays outside the bright X-ray ring.
02:01 The astronomers associate this shell with a blast wave from the Great Eruption.
02:06 Because the newly discovered outer X-ray shell has a similar 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 from Eta Carinae
02:22 well before the mid-1840s Great Eruption, sometime between 1200 and 1800.
02:28 Later, the blast wave from the Great Eruption tore through space and collided with
02:33 and heated the clumps of material to millions of degrees, creating the bright X-ray ring.
02:39 The blast wave has now traveled beyond the bright ring.
02:43 A detailed analysis shows that the Great Eruption likely consisted of two explosions.
02:49 First, there was a quick ejection of low-density gas, which produced the X-ray blast wave.
02:55 This was followed by the slower ejection of dense gas that eventually formed the Homunculus Nebula.
03:02 While Chandra has revealed so much about Eta Carinae, the story isn't done yet.
03:07 Astronomers are eagerly awaiting the next episode of Data to find out what happens.
03:13 (Electronic Sounds of Data)
03:17 (Musical Tones)