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The star Eta Carina and the open star cluster Trumpler
16 |
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Short objekt description:
Our image shows the open star cluster
Trumpler 16 with its most prominent member, the
star Eta Carina. The raw sum images were only exposed briefly for this image to
prevent overexposure of the bright stars of the cluster. In addition, this also
avoided overexposure of the bright nebulae in which the star cluster is
embedded.
Trumpler 16 is an extremely massive open star cluster, in
which some of the most luminous stars (together with Trumpler 14, top right in
the image) of our Milky Way can be found. The cluster is about 9,500 light
years from the Solar System and the stars are only about 10 million years old.
The brightest members of the cluster are the stars Eta Carinae and WR
25 (a Wolf Rayet star), whose luminosity is several million times that of the
Sun. There are three other extremely blue stars of spectral class O 3. Eta
Carinae and WR 25 are both binary stars whose main components each contribute
most to the luminosity, but whose companions are themselves more massive and
brighter than most of the stars in the cluster. |
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Trumpler 16 and Trumpler 14 are the most significant star clusters in
Carina OB1, an extensive star association in the Sagittarius arm of the Milky
Way. Another cluster, Collinder 228 (25 arc minutes south of Eta Carina), is
thought to be an outlier of Trumpler 16, separated only visually from an
intervening dust band. The spectral types of the stars of Trumpler 16 and
Collinder 228 indicate a single star-forming wave.
Eta Carina is an
extremely unstable star and one of the main candidates for the next supernova
explosion in our Milky Way. We describe it in detail
on this website.
A general overview of the
Carina Nebula in a mosaic view
is shown here.
« Click here or on the thumbnail to load a large image with
object names and size comparison to the moon. |
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All Images and all Content are ©
by Franz Hofmann + Wolfgang Paech |