Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Space...The Awesome Frontier



 

It's been a while since I've posted a bit of science news, and the above image was so pretty I had to share.  Taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, the image shows some of the most massive stars in our Galaxy, as they've never been seen before.

 
The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed two of the most massive stars in our galaxy as never before. Located 7,500 light years away from Earth in the Carina Nebula, these stars are rare ultra-hot, super-bright stars that emit primarily ultraviolet radiation, that gives them a blue hue.

 

WR25, the brightest of the stars near the center of the image, is actually a large star 50 times the size of our sun with another star half that size orbiting around it. To the upper left of WR25, the third brightest star in this image is really a triple star cluster. Two are so close together that telescopes with less resolution can't resolve them. The third star may take hundreds of thousands of years to orbit around them.

 

The second brightest star, to the left in the image, is actually a less massive star that appears bright because it is much closer to earth than the others.

 

(Via Wired)

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