NASA Captures Stars' Contest with Speedy Stellar Winds in 3D (VIDEO)

NASA has captured some surprising and spectacular activity from the Superstar Eta Carinae. Now, they've used new 3D models that reveal never-before-seen features of the stars' interactions as decade-old shells of ionized gas race away from Eta Carinae at a million miles per hour.

Eta Carinae is the most luminous and massive star within 10,000 light-years of Earth. It's known for its surprising behavior; it erupted twice in the 19^th century, and scientists still don't understand why. Due to these eruptions, researchers have closely monitored the star, using both NASA satellites and ground-based telescopes. Now, they may have created a 3D model from the data they've collected to better understand exactly what's happening.

Eta Carinae isn't just one star, but is instead a binary star system. These two massive stars have eccentric orbits that bring them unusually close every 5.5 years. Both of them produce powerful gaseous outflows called stellar winds, which enshroud the stars and stymy efforts to directly measure their properties.

The primary star, the brighter and cooler of the stars, has about 90 times the mass of our own sun, and outshines it by five million times. The smaller, hotter star has about 30 solar masses and emits about a million times our sun's light.

In the model, the interaction of the two stellar winds accounts for many of the periodic changes seen in the system. The winds from each star have markedly different properties: thick and slow for the primary star, and lean and fast for the companion star. The primary's wind blows at nearly one million miles per hour and is especially dense. In contrast, the companion's wind carries off about 100 times less material, but is about six times as fast. More interestingly, when the companion star rapidly swings around the primary, its faster wind carves out a spiral cavity in the dense outflow of the larger star. The model itself revealed that this created lengthy, spine-like protrusions in the gas flow along the edges of the cavity.

"We think these structures are real and that they form as a result of instabilities in the flow of the months around the closest approach," said Thomas Madura, one of the researchers, in a news release. "I wanted to make 3D prints of the simulations to better visualize them, which turned out to be far more successful than I ever imagined."

The findings reveal a bit more about these spectacular stars, and show a bit more about their unusual winds. It's likely that, eventually, one-or both-of the stars will end their lives in supernova explosions.

Want to learn more? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube.

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