September 11, 2008 - AstronomyNow.com
Scientists have shown that the outbursts of Eta Carinae, the Milky Way’s biggest, brightest and perhaps most studied star after the Sun, could be driven by an entirely new type of stellar explosion that is fainter than a typical supernova.
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Using the international Gemini South 8-metre telescope and the Blanco 4-metre telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, Smith and colleagues studied the enigmatic star and noticed something new: extremely fast filaments of gas speeding away from the star at five times the speed of the debris in the Homunculus nebula.
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