Friday, August 17, 2007

A real shooting star

This image from Nasa is amazing. It shows Mira, a star in the constellation Cetus. Turns out that Mira is a giant red star, and has been periodically shedding it's atmosphere as it moves along the main sequence to becoming a white dwarf, a path that our Sun will eventually take. What's cool about this though is that Mira has and extremely high speed relative to the interstellar medium - about 130 kilometers per second (about 80 miles per second). In the Interstellar medium is gas and dust, basically a thin fog floating among the stars. As Mira moves through this fog, the gas it is shedding blown backwards, leaving a long tail behind it, and resulting in the image you see below:


Now, you can't see this in visible light, but the these images were taken in the ultraviolet, which means the gas is emitting UV radiation. The images were taken by the Galaxy Explorer (GalEx) mission. You can see the differences in the image below (top is UV, bottom is visible, where Mira looks like a regular star.

This is why astronomy is so cool!

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