Like intergalactic paparazzi, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captured the quick, fading celebrity status of a supernova, the self-detonation of a star. The Hubble snapshots have been assembled into a telling movie of the titanic stellar blast disappearing into oblivion in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525, located 70 million light-years away.
There's a great descriptive article about this on the
NASA website. You can find it here:
And you know why it blew up? Yep. Global warming. Time to start getting scared.
ReplyDeleteThe top photo is actually Eta Carinae, a Wolf-Rayet star that occasionally blows off shells of gas. The ultaviolet light given off by such a hot star ionizes the gas and makes it glow. Wolf-Rayet stars are big and bright and WILL become supernovas but Eta Carinae has a while yet before that happens.
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