NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has spotted a brilliant “celebrity star,” one of the brightest stars seen in our galaxy, surrounded by a glowing halo of gas and dust and living on the edge of destruction.
The star, called AG Carinae, is a few million years old and resides 20,000 light-years away inside our Milky Way galaxy. It is estimated to be up to 70 times more massive than our Sun and shines with the blinding brilliance of one million suns.
The price for its opulence is “living on the edge.” It is waging a tug-of-war between gravity and radiation to avoid self-destruction.
Hubble’s sharp vision revealed the most prominent features of AG Carinae — filamentary structures shaped like tadpoles and lopsided bubbles. These structures are dust clumps illuminated by the star’s reflected light.
The tadpole-shaped features, most prominent at left and bottom, are denser dust clumps that have been sculpted by the stellar wind.
The image was taken in visible and ultraviolet light. Ultraviolet light offers a slightly clearer view of the filamentary dust structures that extend all the way down toward the star. Hubble is ideally suited for ultraviolet-light observations because this wavelength range can only be viewed from space.