Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Enormous Star blazes speedy and enraged in snap

An exceptional model of enormous stars that survive fast and die young has been photographed by a European observatory in Chile.The blazing hot star is called WR 22 and is detaching its atmosphere many millions of times sooner than our own sun in external blasts that unleash powerful radiation releases.

t has about 70 times the mass of the sun, and its brightness permits Earth spectators to spot its intensity with the unaided eye from over 5,000 light-years away. A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

WR 22 sits in a southern arrangement of stars, the Carina Constellation, which symbolizes the keel of Jason's ship Argo in Greek mythology. It is one of many incredibly bright stars in the Carina Nebula a giant province of star structure in the southern Milky Way galaxy.

The astronomical sighting came from European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory. Its colorful image imitates the interactions between the extreme ultraviolet radiation coming from hot massive stars such as WR 22 and vast gas clouds composed mostly of hydrogen.

The upper-left image also contains the star Eta Carinae, just 7,500 light-years away and more than 100 times the mass of our sun. Astronomers expect such gigantic stars to lose their entire hydrogen envelopes before they go out with a supernova bang.


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