The most intense battle in the history of the Milky Way was recorded

After years of studying the universe, scientists have for the first time published images of battles that are considered "the most fierce " of our Milky Way.

Eta Carinae is one of the brightest and heaviest binary stars in the constellation Bo To, surrounded by a dumbbell-shaped nebula creating gusts of gas and dust " erupting " about two centuries ago.

About 7,500 light-years from Earth, these two stars with the largest mass and density of our galaxy have participated in an " extremely violent war " for millennia.

Photo source: Nathan Smith (University of California, Berkeley) and NASA

However, astronomers have now published in Astronomy & Astrophysics magazine that they have captured the center of the system at the highest resolution ever before, confirming recent predictions about the what's going on there.

Eta Carinae was once called a " supernova " because the movement of two stars was so big that it was almost equivalent to a star exploding.

In about 1837, the " Great Eruption " eventually happened, lasting for 18 years and creating the Homunculus nebula, which illuminated all objects in the Milky Way.

Astronomers are still not sure why this binary star system has such terrible battles, but the Eta Carinae binary star system continues to create wind-filled winds and dust with speed. up to 10 million km / h. That's what supposedly facilitates " nourishment " and nebula formation, like NASA's computer model, but no one can be sure why this is happening:

The two stars in this star system are Eta Carinae A and B. In the two stars, Eta Carinae B is a smaller star but has 30 times the mass of our Sun and a million times brighter . And Eta Carinae A is 90 times larger than the Sun and 5 million times brighter.

Every 5.5 years, these two stars move together, like the distance from Mars to the Sun is about 228 million kilometers, which is called "periastron passage".

Image source: Lithopsian / Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The last time this close-up point occurred in August 2014 and luckily, it was at that time that the Southern European Observatory (ESO) successfully installed a giant telescope (Very Large Telescope Interferometer - VLTI ) to be able to observe this phenomenon.

Although the image results from the VLTI telescope are not clear .

Photo source: ESO;Business Insider

. but it was enough to confirm that there was a fierce battle between the two stars Eta Carinae.

In general, every star inside this binary system has the ability to release extremely powerful molecular winds, pushing the temperature to 50 million degrees Celsius. The dust and gas from both sides have formed the nebula. dumbbells surround both stars, as the NASA simulation suggests :

" Our dream has come true, " said Gerd Weigelt, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy Radio, speaking in a press release about the new image of ESO.

" We can now have clearer images, creating a unique opportunity to acquire more knowledge about Eta Carinae, as well as similar objects in the universe, " Gerd Weigelt added.

Maybe in the future, astronomers will use them and other new resolution images to find out why one of the biggest explosions in their galaxy history has been formed. me.