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Article: A furious, dying star; In the skies of the Southern Hemisphere glows Eta Carinae, a huge star so bright, so violent and so strange that it has defied the best efforts of astronomers to explain it.(NEWS)
- Article from:
- Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
- Article date:
- November 18, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Star Tribune Co. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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About 8,000 light-years away from Earth in the Milky Way galaxy, on a nearby spiral arm of stars and dust, is an object so big, so bizarre and so unstable that astronomers simply don't know how to describe it.
They do know that it is a star, maybe even two closely bound stars, only a few million years old and furiously burning toward a quick death. The star is known as Eta Carinae and it is expected to create the mother of all stellar explosions, a "hypernova," at its moment of death.
That could happen 30,000 years from now, a thousand years from now, or today. In stellar lifetime terms, the end is near. When it goes, the blast will send out high ...