Free Astronomy Magazine November-December 2016

30 NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2016 SPACE CHRONICLES system was observed by astrono- mers in the 1830s. We now know that this was caused by the larger star of the pair expelling huge amounts of gas and dust in a short amount of time, which led to the distinctive lobes, known as the Ho- munculus Nebula, that we see in the system today. The combined ef- fect of the two stellar winds as they smash into each other at ex- treme speeds is to create tempera- tures of millions of degrees and intense deluges of X-ray radiation. The central area where the winds collide is so comparatively tiny — a thousand times smaller than the Homunculus Nebula — that tele- scopes in space and on the ground so far have not been able to image them in detail. The team has now utilised the powerful resolving ability of the VLTI instrument AMBER to peer into this violent realm for the first time. A clever combination — an interferometer — of three of the four Auxiliary Tele- scopes at the VLT lead to a tenfold Highest resolution image of Eta Carinae by ESO L ed by Gerd Weigelt from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy (MPIfR) in Bonn, a team of astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope Interferome- ter (VLTI) at ESO’s Paranal Observa- tory to take a unique image of the Eta Carinae star system in the Ca- rina Nebula. This colossal binary system consists of two massive stars orbiting each other and is very active, producing stellar winds which travel at veloci- ties of up to ten million kilometres per hour (the two stars are so mas- sive and bright that the radiation they produce rips off their surfaces and spews them into space. This expulsion of stellar material is re- ferred to as stellar “wind”, and it can travel at millions of kilometres per hour). The zone between the two stars where the winds from each collide is very turbulent, but until now it could not be studied. The power of the Eta Carinae bi- nary pair creates dramatic pheno- mena. A “Great Eruption” in the T his image is a colour composite made from exposures from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 (DSS2). The field of view is approximately 4.7 x 4.9 degrees. [ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2]