Using snapshots taken over 20 years with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, astronomers have learned important new details about an eruption from Eta Carinae witnessed on Earth in the mid-19th century.
Eta Carinae is a system that contains two massive stars . In the middle of the 19th century, Eta Carinae was observed to experience a huge explosion thathave dubbed the"Great Eruption." During this event, Eta Carinae ejected between 10 and 45 times the mass of the sun. This material became a dense pair of spherical clouds of gas, now called the Homunculus Nebula, on opposite sides of the two stars.
Because the newly discovered outer X-ray shell has a similar shape and orientation to the Homunculus Nebula, Corcoran and his colleagues think both structures have a common origin. With XMM-Newton, the researchers saw that the X-ray brightness of Eta Carinae has faded with time, agreeing with previous observations of the system obtained with NASA's Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer telescope on the International Space Station.
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