Replies to post #167759 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

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A Disheveled, Wandering Star (Has a Sneezing Fit)


NASA

Gesundheit.

By Megan Garber
Jul 9 2012, 4:11 PM ET

U Camelopardalis [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_Camelopardalis ] is a star on the brink. The carbon star -- 1,500 light years away from us, in the Camelopardalis constellation [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camelopardalis_%28constellation%29 ] -- is nearing the end of its life. And as stars run low on fuel, they become unstable. U Cam has an atmosphere that contains more carbon than oxygen -- and, due to its low surface gravity, as much as half of U Cam's total mass can be lost to the forces of stellar winds.

Every few thousand years, NASA notes [ http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2302.html ], U Cam "coughs out a nearly spherical shell of gas as a layer of helium around its core begins to fuse." When the star experienced its latest wheeze, the Hubble Space Telescope [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope ] was there to capture the fit.

In the picture above, the explosion of gas makes U Cam seem much larger than it actually is. (The gas is the murky halo around the bright-white star itself.) And the brightness of the explosion, NASA notes, saturated the Hubble camera's receptors -- meaning that U Cam, the sneezy, wheezy carbon star, is actually much daintier than the image above suggests.

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/a-disheveled-wandering-star-has-a-sneezing-fit/259595/ [with comment]

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