Eta Carinae
Remember when you were a kid and you had a favorite dinosaur or favorite animal? I had a favorite star: Eta Carinae, that always dazzled me when I saw pictures of it in books. It’s a HUGE star with roughly 100 times the mass of our sun and it’s not that far away (about 8,000 light years). What’s amazing about it is that it’s in its final death throes, belching out huge amounts of material full of heavy elements fused in its core. While it may look like a diseased brain, the star itself is at the center glowing over a million times brighter than our sun. This sucker is about to go any minute now; well it may have actually died but it’ll take 8,000 years for us to see it; regardless when this star’s fuel runs out, the core will collapse under intense gravity to form a black hole…and here’s the kicker, it may also produce a Gamma Ray burst! This is a little scary having a GRB so close to Earth because if one of the two insanely intense beams of energy shooting out along the poles were to hit us, Earth and all life dies. Don’t freak out – see how Eta Car’s orientation is tilted a bit? It ain’t pointing at us.
I bring up Eta Carinae today because Hubble is fully operational again and it snapped a picture of it using it’s advanced Spectrascope, which breaks up the light to reveal elemental compositions, and the results are pretty spectacular…
By analyzing the light with the Spectrascope, Hubble is showing us all of the heavy elements spewing from the star. This is important because massive stars heat up and fuse elements to create heavier elements. We can see from this image that it’s kicking out Helium, Argon, Nitrogen and…Iron! Iron is really important here because as a star runs out of one fuel it compresses and heats up which often leads to the fusing of heavier elements which releases lots of energy. But Iron is a problem for massive stars because it takes more energy to fuse Iron than is actually released. So Eta Carinae is really damned close to hitting the limit and when it does it’s going to go kablammo!
Iron…it’s bad for stars, but good for us. Yep, the iron in your blood came from a star like Eta Carinae billions of years ago.