Free Astronomy Magazine January-February 2022

21 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2022 ASTRO PUBLISHING Leonis is relatively turbulent, with a complex inner structure that as- tronomers believe may be sculpted by a nearby companion star. The bright beams of light radiating outwards from CW Leonis are one of the most intriguing parts of this image, as they’ve changed in bright- ness within a 15 year period — an incredibly short span of time in as- tronomical terms. Astronomers speculate that gaps in the shroud of dust surrounding CW Leonis may allow these beams of starlight to pierce through and illu- minate dust further from the star. However the exact cause of the dra- matic changes in their brightness is as yet unexplained. Detailed Hubble observations of CW Leonis taken over the last two decades also show the expansion of ring-like threads of ejected material around the star — CW Leonis’s sloughed-off outer layers. This image incorporates observa- tions from 2011 and 2016 by one of Hubble’s workhorse instruments, the Wide Field Camera 3. CW Leonis is brightest in the red filters, R and I, and therefore the simmering orange colour pervading the centre of the image well represents the real colour of the star. CW Leonis glowers from deep within a thick shroud of dust in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Lying roughly 400 light- years from Earth in the constellation Leo, CW Leonis is a carbon star — a luminous type of red giant star with a carbon-rich atmosphere. The dense clouds of sooty gas and dust engulfing this dying star were created as the outer layers of CW Leo- nis itself were thrown out into the void. [ESA/Hubble & NASA, T. Ueta, H. Kim] Z oom into CW Leo- nis. [ESA/Hub- ble, NASA, Dark Energy Survey/DOE/F NAL/NOIR- Lab/NSF/AUR A, Digitized Sky Survey 2, E. Slawik, N. Risinger, M. Zamani] !