The constellation Carina has been known for many centuries; it is located in the southern hemisphere of the celestial vault and includes 206 stars that can be observed with the naked eye.
Canopus over the Peaks Desert - Nambung National Park - Western Australia
Among the stars of the constellation Carina is located, which has the second brightest place among all stars (after) and is the alpha of the constellation Carina. Carina contains interesting asterisms - a couple of Crosses: Diamond and False, as well as several nebulae and galaxies that are quite bright and attractive for studying. Among the latter are the Southern Pleiades and the Diamond Cluster, which can be observed without the aid of optics.
Location in the sky
Constellation Carina, view in the planetarium program
Carina is surrounded by such constellations as Flying Fish, Centaurus, Chameleon, Fly, Puppis, Sail and Painter. To find it, you need to discover a section of the sky that was previously called the Argo Ship, and in the lower part of which the desired constellation is located. You can recognize it by the brightest star of the southern latitudes - Canopus, which is visible only below the 37th parallel of the Northern Hemisphere. Additional landmarks for detecting the constellation are the Diamond and False Crosses, which look like regular rhombuses, which should not be confused with the Southern Cross, which is located even further south.
To see Canopus, you need to go to the south of Greece or Turkmenistan, Egypt, India or Mexico. Its apparent magnitude is -0.72 (for comparison, Sirius is -1.46). The diameter of this star is 65 solar, it is approximately 8-9 times heavier than our star, and radiates 14 thousand times more powerfully. The distance to Canopus, according to the latest data, is estimated at 96 parsecs (310 light years). According to stellar classification, it is classified as a supergiant. Previously, it was used by navigators for navigation in equatorial waters and the Southern Hemisphere. Russian celestial navigation systems often use this star as the main one (the backup star is Sirius).
Avior
Avior is the second brightest star in Carinae, with an apparent magnitude of 1.86. It can be observed south of Canopus, starting from the 30th parallel of the Northern Hemisphere. This star is known to be a double star and is approximately 630 light years away from the Solar System. A pair in it is formed by an orange giant living out its life and a hot blue star of class B2 V, which from time to time obscure each other, which leads to a cyclic change in their total brightness by 0.1 magnitude.
Eta Carina
Eta Carinae was once the second star in the sky in terms of apparent brightness. Having reached its maximum luminosity in 1843, it began to fade sharply and already in 1870 it ceased to be visible to the naked eye. However, it continues to actively emit in the infrared range, which can be detected with special devices. It is believed that this is not one star, but a system consisting of at least two stars, the larger of which had a mass 150 times higher than that of the Sun, while already dumping 30 solar masses into the surrounding space. The second star is five times lighter. The system is surrounded by the Carina, Homunculus and Keyhole nebulae. The last two are the result of the release of stellar matter from the larger of the stars.
Homunculus Nebula
The star Eta Carinae is the white dot in the center of the image, at the junction of the two lobes of the Homunculus Nebula
The Homunculus owes its birth to the ejection of stellar matter from the star Eta Carinae, which occurred in 1842. The nebula became visible in the sky at the beginning of the 20th century, when it reached a size equal to 0.7 light years. The homunculus has gas-dynamic instability, and therefore has a lumpy and constantly changing appearance. Inside this nebula, a more modest one was discovered (dubbed the Little Homunculus), born during the second, less powerful explosion of Eta Carinae, which occurred at the end of the 19th century.
Asterisms of Carina
Diamond Cross Asterism
The constellation is known for two asterisms. One of them is the Diamond Cross, which consists of four fairly bright stars forming a rhombus in the sky, almost regular in shape. At its peaks are located beta, theta, upsilon and omega Carinae.
The second - the False Cross - is located on the border with Velas and includes two luminaries from each constellation. Both asterisms are very similar to the Southern Cross, which has repeatedly led to navigational errors by sailors who crossed the equator for the first time.
History of the constellation
Initially, the star atlas, created by Ptolemy, contained a large constellation called the Argo Ship. After completing his southern expedition, dedicated to studying the sky at latitudes previously inaccessible to residents of the Northern Hemisphere, Lacaille proposed dividing it into several according to design criteria. This is how Sails, Keel and Stern appeared. To these was added the Compass, which was not previously part of the large constellation. Such global changes in the map of the sky occurred in 1752 and, in essence, have been preserved to the present day.
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August 29, 2018
A stunning image of the Carina Nebula, one of the largest and brightest nebulae in the night sky, was captured by the VISTA telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. Observations in infrared rays allowed the VISTA telescope to see through the masses of hot gas and dark dust filling the nebula, many stars, both newborns and finishing their life cycles.
About 7,500 light years away, in the constellation Carina, there is a nebula within which stars are born and die side by side with each other. These violent processes form the Carina Nebula, a gigantic, dynamically developing cloud of interstellar gas and dust.
In its depths, massive stars emit powerful radiation, causing the gas around them to glow. In contrast, neighboring regions of the nebula contain dark masses of dust within which newborn stars lurk. Thus, there is an ongoing battle between the stars and dust in the Carina Nebula, and the newly formed stars are winning: the high-energy radiation and stellar wind they emit evaporate and disperse the dusty stellar nursery in which they were born.
The Carina Nebula extends over 300 light years. It is one of the largest star-forming regions in the Milky Way. On a dark night it is easy to see in the sky with the naked eye. But, to the chagrin of those of us in the north, it is only visible in the southern hemisphere, as it lies 60 degrees south of the celestial equator.
Inside this remarkable nebula lies an object that has the reputation of being the most unusual star system known, Eta Carinae. This monstrous double star is the most powerful in terms of energy release in the surrounding area. In the 1930s it was one of the brightest objects in the sky, but since then its luminosity has fallen sharply. It is finishing its life cycle, but remains one of the most massive and brightest stars in the Milky Way.
In the above image, Eta Carinae can be seen as part of a bright spot of light just above the top of the V-shaped feature formed by the dust clouds. To the right of Eta Carinae, also inside the Carina Nebula, lies the relatively small Keyhole Nebula, a compact and dense cloud of cold molecular gas containing several massive stars. The appearance of this nebula has also changed dramatically over the past centuries.
The Carina Nebula was discovered in the 1750s by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, who was then at the Cape of Good Hope. Since then, a huge number of images of her have been obtained. But the image, taken with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, provides a wide-field image in unprecedented detail. The high sensitivity of the receiver in the infrared region made it possible to identify agglomerations of young stars hidden inside the dust clouds that fill the nebula. In 2014, using the VISTA telescope, near infrared radiation was detected in the Carina Nebula, which made it possible to get an objective idea of the scale of star formation occurring in it. VISTA is the world's largest wide-field infrared telescope specializing in sky surveys. Its large diameter and wide field of view allow astronomers to obtain completely new images of objects in the southern sky.
Notes
The Principal Investigator of the observing program that produced this image was Jim Emerson, School of Physics & Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London, UK. His collaborators were Simon Hodgkin and Mike Irwin, Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, Cambridge University, UK. Data processing was performed by Mike Irwin and Jim Lewis (Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit, Cambridge University, UK).
To learn more
The European Southern Observatory (ESO, European Southern Observatory) is the leading intergovernmental astronomical organization in Europe, far outperforming other ground-based astronomical observatories in the world. 15 countries participate in its work: Austria, Belgium, Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Finland, France, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Sweden, as well as Chile, which has donated its territory to host ESO observatories, and Australia, which is its strategic partner. ESO has an ambitious program to design, build and operate powerful ground-based observing instruments that enable astronomers to carry out critical scientific research. ESO also plays a leading role in organizing and supporting international cooperation in astronomy. ESO has three unique world-class observation sites located in Chile: La Silla, Paranal and Chajnantor. The Paranal Observatory houses ESO's The Very Large Telescope (VLT), capable of operating in the VLTI format, and two of the largest wide-field telescopes: VISTA, which surveys the sky in infrared rays, and the VLT optical survey telescope ( VLT Survey Telescope). ESO is also one of the main partners in the operation of two submillimeter instruments on the Chajnantor plateau: the APEX telescope and ALMA, the largest astronomical project of our time. On Cerro Armazones, near Paranal, ESO is building the 39-metre Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), which will be "humanity's greatest eye on the sky."
Supergiant Star Eta Carinae (Eta Carinae)
The massive supergiant star is located 7,500 light-years from Earth. The outer horseshoe ring has a temperature of approximately 3 million degrees Kelvin. This ring is approximately two light years in diameter. It was probably formed by an explosion that occurred more than a thousand years ago. The blue cloud in the middle is three light months in diameter and the hottest. The white region, less than a light month in diameter, is the hottest and may contain a superstar.
Eta Carinae (η Car, η Carinae) is a hypergiant star in the constellation Carinae, a bright blue variable ( LBV), one of the largest and most unstable stars known to science.
The mass of η Carinae is 100-150 solar masses, which is close to the theoretical limit, the bolometric luminosity is about 5 million solar. The star is surrounded by the large, bright nebula NGC 3372 (the Carina Nebula), as well as the small, recently formed Homunculus Nebula (see below). Not far from the star is the Keyhole Nebula. Some scientists believe that η Carinae will go supernova before other stars in the Milky Way.
The absolute magnitude of the star is −12 m, which means that at a distance of 10 parsecs, Eta Carinae in the earth's sky would be as bright as the Moon at full moon. By comparison, the Sun from such a distance would be barely visible to the naked eye.
In historical times, η Carinae has varied greatly in brightness. In Halley's 1677 catalog, the fourth magnitude is indicated; in 1730 the star became one of the brightest in Carina, but in 1782 it again became very faint. In 1820, a sharp increase in the brightness of the star began and in April 1843 it reached an apparent magnitude of −0.8 m, becoming the second brightest in the sky after Sirius. After this, the brightness dropped hundreds of times, and by 1870 the star became invisible to the naked eye. As of 2005, the apparent magnitude is about 5-6 m. At the same time, η Carinae remains one of the brightest sources of infrared radiation outside the Solar System. The star is located at a distance of 7500-8000 light years from the Sun.
This Carinae loses mass so quickly that its photosphere is not gravitationally bound to the star and is “blown away” by radiation into the surrounding space. During the 1841-1843 flare, the bipolar Homunculus Nebula, which measures 12 by 18 arcseconds, formed around the star. The mass of dust in Homunculus is about 0.04 solar masses, and several solar masses are believed to have been ejected during the flare.
The star has the modern name Foramen (lat. foramen"hole") associated with the Keyhole Nebula close to the star.
Spectacular image from the Hubble telescope
Truly, there is no limit to the greatness of the Universe. Of course, being on Earth, a person is not able to see all its splendor. But wonderful tools can help - telescopes. And one of them is the Hubble Space Telescope, which turned twenty years old this year.
Here is a remarkable image from the Hubble telescope - the pillars of cold molecular gas of the Carina Nebula, NGC 3372. Tall towers of cold molecular hydrogen, riddled with dust, rise from the wall of the nebula. The scene is reminiscent of the classic “Pillars of Creation” image taken by a telescope back in 1995, but these images are even more striking in their cosmic beauty.
As a rule, the heroes of the most beautiful photographs are born and dying stars. So, in the photograph of the Carina Nebula we see a spectacularly illuminated dense cloud. In an image of the same part of the Universe in the infrared spectrum, the cloud disappears, and young stars appear before us, their age does not exceed 100 thousand years.
Hubble sent back 48 images forming a panoramic image of part of the Carina Nebula, 50 light-years across. This giant diffuse nebula is one of the largest regions in our Milky Way galaxy. It spans more than 300 light-years and is located about 7,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Carina.
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Violent processes of the birth and death of stars take place in it, and some especially large stars are 50 to 100 times larger than our Sun.
It is believed that such active processes began 3 million years ago.
Scientists do not rule out that processes similar to those observed in this nebula could have led to the formation of our Earth and the entire solar system 4.6 billion years ago.
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Hubble Captures Spectacular "Landscape" in the Carina Nebula
Compass and Scale Image for UVIS/IR/Details
The eerie scene of the birth of a new star in the Carina Nebula is captured in this image taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera.
They say that the Karina Nebula is similar to one of the most revered Indian gods, Ganesha.
Ganesha is the elephant-headed god of wisdom and remover of obstacles, patron of trade and travelers.
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesha
http://www.foxdesign.ru/legend/ganesha2.html
Ground Image and Constellation Region Around Carina Nebula - this is how it looks from the surface of the Earth, in the southern hemisphere.
Ground Image of the Carina Nebula
Astronomers using the Spitzer infrared telescope have obtained a new image of the Carina Nebula, which can be seen with the naked eye in the southern hemisphere of Earth. It glows due to the energy emitted by the extremely massive stars within it. These hot stars generate winds that move gas at speeds of 1,600 km per second. Thanks to observations in the infrared region of the spectrum, scientists were able to detect more than 17,000 recently formed stars in this nebula.
CTIO Image of Carina Nebula
The technical name for the stellar jets are Herbig-Haro objects/o One of Herbig's brightest objects is Haro.
Near the nebula is the monster star Eta, one of the most massive and hottest stars known.
The dark knots of dust and complex formations were formed by powerful stellar winds and highly energetic radiation coming from the ultraviolet variable star η Carinae (η Car).
In 1840, astronomers observed the explosion of this star. For several months there was no brighter star in the southern sky.
In 1990, scientists noticed that the spectrum of Eta Carina changes with a periodicity of 5.5 years.
It is assumed that the reason for the change may be the presence of a companion star.
This Karina has enormous luminosity. It is 100 times more massive than the Sun and 5 million times brighter in luminosity.
The star is in the last stage of evolution and is constantly generating emissions. So in 1841, another outbreak was observed, which gave birth to the Homunculus Nebula.
The star loses approximately 500 Earth masses annually.
At present, it is difficult to estimate the boundary between the outer layers of the star and the surrounding nebula.
"High-resolution X-ray images of Eta Carinae from 1992 (left) and 1994 (right). X-rays are emitted from hot gas in an oval shell around Eta Carinae. - High-resolution X-ray image of Eta Carinae in 1992 ( left) and 1994 (right) The X-rays come from hot gas in the oval "shell" around Eta Carina.
Inside this interstellar monster (right) is a star that is gradually destroying it.
Inside the head of this interstellar monster is a star that is slowly destroying it. The monster, on the right, is actually an inanimate pillar of gas and dust that measures over a light year in length.
The star, which cannot be seen due to dust, partially reveals itself by emitting energy beams of particles. Eventually, the stars will reach their “goal”, destroying the pillars of their creation within 100,000, resulting in the formation of a new open cluster of stars.
The star, not itself visible through the opaque dust, is bursting out partly by ejecting energetic beams of particles. Similar epic battles are being waged all over the star-forming Carina Nebula. The stars will win in the end, destroying their pillars of creation over the next 100,000 years, and resulting in a new open cluster of stars.
pink dots are newborn stars that have already freed themselves from the monster that gave birth to them.
The pink dots around the image are newly formed stars that have already been freed from their birth monster. The above image was released last week in commemoration of the Hubble Space Telescopes 20th year of operation.
These stellar ejections are called Herbig-Haro objects. How the star forms these streams is unknown and is a topic of research, but it likely involves an accretion disk orbiting the central star. The second imprinting ejection of Herbig-Haro occurs diagonally near the imaginary center.
The technical name for the stellar jets are Herbig-Haro objects. How a star creates Herbig-Haro jets is an ongoing topic of research, but it likely involves an accretion disk swirling around a central star. A second impressive Herbig-Haro jet occurs diagonally near the image center.
Reference:
Herbig-Haro objects are small areas of nebulae associated with young stars. They form when gas ejected from these stars interacts with nearby clouds of gas and dust at speeds of several hundred kilometers per second. Herbig-Haro objects are characteristic of star-forming regions; sometimes they are observed near single stars - elongated along the axis of rotation of the latter.
Based on observations from the Hubble Telescope, one can see the complex evolution of these regions over a period of just a few years: while some parts of them dim, others, on the contrary, become brighter, colliding with the lumpy matter of the interstellar medium.
Observations revealed that the nature of these objects is associated with emissions of matter. This led to the understanding that the ejected matter that forms such nebulae is highly collimated (reduced into narrow streams). In the first few hundred thousand years of their existence, stars are often surrounded by accretion disks formed by falling gas, and the high speed of rotation of the internal parts of the disk leads to emissions of partially ionized plasma directed perpendicular to the plane of the disk - the so-called polar jet streams. When such ejections collide with matter from the interstellar medium, areas of bright radiation characteristic of Herbig-Haro objects are formed.
Vladilen Stepanovich, tell us a little about the background to the discovery of the cosmic laser effect. In general, how was it possible to make such a discovery?
Yes, indeed, I spoke about this effect at the Lebedev Physics Institute and a few days before at the US NASA Goddard Space Research Center in Greenbelt near Washington. It is there that the Hubble Space Telescope Control Center is located, with the help of which this discovery was made. Only this unique astronomical instrument allows such research to be carried out reliably.
A grandiose scientific project - the Hubble Space Telescope, worth several billion dollars - has been operating in low-Earth orbit at an altitude of 500 kilometers for 12 years. Not only is it maintained in excellent working order, but it is also constantly improved during regular space shuttle service missions. During the recent fourth successful servicing mission of the shuttle Columbia (costing hundreds of millions of dollars) in March of this year, Hubble's performance was radically improved, the depth of scanning of outer space increased tenfold. It has become possible to observe galaxy collisions occurring at a distance of about half a billion light years. According to NASA experts, the latest improvement to the Hubble telescope opens a new era of research with its help.
All observations at the telescope are processed at the Goddard Center and within a year become available to scientists around the world. Any researcher in any country and anywhere gets access to this unique scientific information completely free of charge via the Internet. In this regard, it would be useful to recall that an observation session with the Hubble telescope during 3-4 revolutions around the Earth costs US taxpayers about half a million dollars.
Naturally, astronomers and astrophysicists from hundreds of laboratories and universities in many countries invest intellectual and financial potential, probably of comparable magnitude, in the interpretation of the obtained observational data. Moreover, the observation program on Hubble is being built on a competitive basis with international participation and covers both our Solar System, our Galaxy, and the vast extragalactic space - other galaxies right up to the outskirts of the Universe.
But let's return to the laser in the vicinity of the star Eta Carina - the brightest and most massive in our Galaxy... What is the essence of the cosmic laser effect?
I predicted the laser effect in the optical range many years ago after the discovery of microwave masers operating in interstellar clouds. Lasers require more intense excitation, or, as they say, pumping. Such conditions exist in the atmospheres of stars, but the laser effect is difficult to observe in them against the background of intense radiation from the star itself. This Carina is located at a distance of about 8 thousand light years from us. This is an extremely unstable star. It exploded 150 years ago, and at the time of the explosion was observed in the Southern Hemisphere as the second brightest star (after Sirius).
As a result of the explosion of the star, a huge amount of matter was thrown into the surrounding space in the form of atoms of all elements of the periodic table. Atoms in the vicinity of a star are ionized by high-temperature (20-30 thousand degrees) radiation from its surface (photosphere of the star). It is in the mixture of ionized atoms in gas clouds, that is, rarefied circumstellar plasma, near the star that a nonequilibrium state arises, as in a conventional laser, and stimulated emission of photons occurs at quantum transitions, in our case, iron ions. True, there are no mirrors in space, and therefore laser radiation is non-directional, that is, it occurs in all directions, including in the direction of the Earth.
The main component of the matter ejected by the star is hydrogen, and it is its intense monochromatic radiation, arising under the influence of the radiation of the central star Eta Carina, that pumps the levels of iron ions of the cosmic laser. As a result, the faint spectral lines of iron ions, which make up about 0.01% of the circumstellar matter, become bright laser lines. The Hubble Telescope allows the emission from these laser-like circumstellar regions to be observed separately from the emission from the star due to its exceptional angular resolution. That is why this effect was discovered. Essentially, the environment of this bright star (it is several million times brighter than the Sun) is a gigantic natural laboratory for atomic physics and spectroscopy.
Professor Johansson from the Institute of Astronomy at Lund University (Sweden) and I have been studying unusual atomic physical processes in the vicinity of this star in recent years, observed using the unique spectral equipment of the Hubble Telescope. During these studies, we were able to discover a number of interesting effects that had not previously been observed under astrophysical conditions, including the laser effect. We conducted these studies together with Dr. Gull from the Goddard Space Center.
What does this mean for science, for example, for astrophysics?
Unstable exploding stars, called supernovae, are unique objects in space. The star Eta Carina is the closest supernova to us, which can be studied in much more detail than distant supernovae. Astrophysicists do not yet know the nature of these explosions, and therefore the observation of matter ejected into circumstellar space, illuminated by the radiation of the star and therefore observable, is very important for understanding the nature of such stellar explosions. By the way, the explosion of the last supernova, which is fifty times farther from us than Eta Carina, was in 1987, and it was similar to the explosion of Eta Carina. In addition, it is quite possible that supernova explosions in our Galaxy do not pass without leaving a mark on us earthlings.
By and large, three global problems are of universal interest: man himself and life, the Earth on which he lives, and the space in which he is immersed. All these problems are interconnected in obvious and far from obvious ways that are still unclear to us. And it is important that Russia makes a significant contribution to this process of knowledge. Sometimes this contribution is associated with technological breakthroughs and large financial investments. (Let us remember our rapid breakthrough into space.) Now, by the will of fate, our contribution is more connected with the enormous intellectual potential of Russia.
Recently, speaking at the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences on a problem that requires significant financial expenditures that are not yet permissible for Russia, I recalled the words of the great physicist, the founder of nuclear physics, Lord Ernest Rutherford, which he said in the 30s of the last century in the richest British Empire: "We don't have money, but we have to think." It feels like he was saying this for us.
