Eta Carinae

Eta Carinae is a massive, unstable binary star system in the Carina Nebula. Its nineteenth-century Great Eruption created the bipolar Homunculus Nebula and made it one of the sky’s most luminous stellar systems.

Stellar wind collision: The interaction region formed when winds from two stars collide at supersonic speeds. The two stars’ powerful winds collide, producing shock-heated gas and variable high-energy emission.
Carina Nebula: A vast star-forming region in the southern constellation Carina, containing young massive stars and bright nebulae. Eta Carinae lies within this larger star-forming complex.
John Herschel: A British astronomer who studied the southern sky and recorded Eta Carinae during its nineteenth-century brightening. His observations helped document the star’s rise during the Great Eruption.
Supernova: A powerful stellar explosion that marks the destruction or catastrophic transformation of a star. Unlike a supernova, the Great Eruption left Eta Carinae’s central system surviving.
Stellar nucleosynthesis: The production of chemical elements through nuclear reactions inside stars and during stellar explosions. Material expelled by Eta Carinae carries products of nuclear processing into its surroundings.
Eta Carinae's Great Eruption: A nineteenth-century stellar outburst that expelled several solar masses from Eta Carinae without destroying the system. It was an extraordinary mass-loss event whose cause remains unsettled.
Homunculus Nebula: A bipolar nebula of dust and gas surrounding Eta Carinae, expelled largely during the Great Eruption. This is the system’s most conspicuous surviving structure from the nineteenth-century outburst.
Edmond Halley: An English astronomer whose 1677 star catalogue included Eta Carinae, then known as Eta Argus. His catalogue provides an early recorded identification of the star.
Classical nova: A thermonuclear surface eruption on a white dwarf in a close binary system. Its white-dwarf mechanism differs from the massive-star eruption that formed the Homunculus.
Circumstellar medium: Gas and dust surrounding a star, shaped by its winds, eruptions, and radiation. Eta Carinae has heavily sculpted its nearby medium through repeated mass ejections.

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