Huge Lips Created by A Dying Star

(News Today) - It looks like a huge pair of lips pursed into a kiss form one of our next-door neighbours in the universe. The curious formation was captured in a new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (Wise), launched in 2009.

The star (the white dot in the centre of the red ring) is one of the most massive stellar residents of our Milky Way galaxy. Objects like this are called Wolf-Rayet stars, after the astronomers who found the first few, and they make our sun look puny by comparison.

Called V385 Carinae in the Carina constellation, this star is around 16,000 light-years away from earth, about 35 times as massive as our sun, with a diameter nearly 18 times as large.

It's hotter, too, and shines with more than one million times the amount of light. Nasa says hot stars burn out quickly and, as they age, they blow out more and more of the heavier atoms cooking inside them.

The material is puffed out into clouds like the one that glows brightly in this Wise image. I

Astronomers speculate this infrared light comes from oxygen atoms, which have been stripped of some of their electrons by ultraviolet radiation from the star. When the electrons join up again with the oxygen atoms, light is produced that Wise can detect.

The process is similar to what happens in fluorescent light bulbs.

The image mosaic is made up of about 300 overlapping frames, taken as Wise continues its survey of the entire sky.

It's not the first facial feature found in the night sky.

The Helix Nebula - nicknamed the 'Eye of God' - was discovered in 1924 and recently captured by a giant telescope on the Chilean mountains.

Helix is around 700 light-years away in the Aquarius constellation, and is a star similar in size to our sun in its death throes.

Our own sun is expected to die a similar death in about five billion years.

Source : kompas

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