Cette image peut avoir des imperfections car il s’agit d’une image historique ou de reportage.
A huge pair of gas and dust clouds are captured in this stunning Hubble Space Telescope image of the supermassive star Eta Carinae. This extraordinarily high resolution image was created using a combination of image processing techniques: dithering, subsampling and deconvolution. Even though Eta Carinae is more than 8, 000 light-years away, structures only 10 billion miles across (about the diameter of our solar system) can be distinguished. Eta Carinae was observed by Hubble in September 1995 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). Images taken through red and near-ultraviolet filters were subsequently combined to produce this color image. A sequence of eight exposures was necessary to cover the object's huge dynamic range: the outer ejecta blobs are 100, 000 times fainter than the brilliant central star. Eta Carinae was the site of a giant outburst about 150 years ago, releasing as much visible light as a supernova explosion and surviving to become one of the brightest stars in the southern sky. Somehow, the explosion produced two polar lobes and a large thin equatorial disk, all moving outward at about 1.5 million miles per hour. This observation shows that excess violet light escapes along the equatorial plane between the bipolar lobes, where there is relatively little dusty debris and most of the blue light is able to escape. The lobes themselves contain large amounts of dust which preferentially absorb blue light, causing them to appear reddish. Estimated to be 100 times more massive and radiating about five million times more power than our Sun, Eta Carinae may be one of the most massive stars in our Galaxy.