Bright Blue Variable Star Eta Carinae | European Southern Observatory

Bright Blue Variable Star Eta Carinae | European Southern Observatory

This image of the luminous blue variable star Eta Carinae was taken with the NACO near-infrared adaptive optics instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), yielding an incredible amount of detail. The images clearly shows a bipolar structure as well as the jets coming out from the central star.

Eta Carinae is located 7,500 light-years away in the constellation Carina. It is within the Carina Nebula, a giant star-forming region in the Carina–Sagittarius Arm of the Milky Way. Despite its large distance from Earth, Eta Carinae briefly became the second brightest star in the sky in the mid-nineteenth century (with an apparent magnitude -1), surpassed only by Sirius.

The Paranal Observatory’s NAOS+CONICA instrument, better known as NACO, is one of the best ground-based solutions to atmospheric turbulence. Thanks to its pioneering use of Adaptive Optics, NACO delivers images as sharp as if we were in space.

The image was obtained by the Paranal Science team and processed by Yuri Beletsky (ESO) and Hännes Heyer (ESO). It is based on data obtained through broad (J, H, and K; 90 second exposure time per filters) and narrow-bands (1.64, 2.12, and 2.17 microns; probing iron, molecular and atomic hydrogen, respectively; 4 min per filter).

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)

Release Date: May 27, 2008

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