January 4, 2010 - ScienceNews
A new view of Eta Carinae, a nearby star system that is expected to explode as a supernova sometime in the next 10,000 years or so, reveals for the first time clouds of gas that were expelled by one of its stars.
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John Martin of the University of Illinois at Springfield reported new observations of Eta Carinae January 4 at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Astronomers took the new images using the Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager, or NICI, at the Gemini South telescope in Chile. NICI, which was designed to find planets around other stars, uses a system called adaptive optics to cancel out blurring from the Earth’s atmosphere. This feature allowed Martin and his team to create the first visual images of the inner cloud, called the Little Homunculus Nebula. It shows up as a faint brightening around the central star.
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