Eta Carinae is a binary system well known to astronomers. This pair of stars that orbit each other, shines five million times more than the Sun T he origin of the blaze is very strong solar wind generated by each of the members of the duo , which collides at 12 million kilometers per hour and heats the gas to tens of millions of degrees Celsius. The collision forms a dense cloud of material called the Homunculus Nebula, as spectacular as it is frustrating for scientists, since it does not let them see what is happening inside Eta Carinae.
Now, as explained in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, a group of experts from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, in Bonn (Germany), have managed to take the best photos to date of the interior of the violent star system . Led by Gerd Weigelt, they have combined light from three of the four eight-meter telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) , in the Chilean Atacama desert, with an instrument called an interferometer. In this way they have been able to penetrate the relatively small area where the stellar ejections meet (detail boxed in the photo above).
And what have they discovered? Most striking is a strange fan-shaped structure in the exact spot where the wind from the smallest star hits the densest gusts of its companion. In addition, the new images will allow them to measure the speed of stellar winds to create computational models of Eta Carinae and better understand how massive stars in the universe evolve .
