Telescope captures breathtaking cosmic fireworks given off by exploding star

In a first, a telescope recently captured an exceptional phenomenon seen in space where a supermassive star exploded, giving off mesmerizing bright, glowing fireworks.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been observing the star, called Eta Carinae, for the past 25 years. Recently, astronomers used the telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 in order to map the UV light glow of magnesium embedded on warm gas, and discovered the gas in place where it wasn’t before.

“We had used Hubble for decades to study Eta Carinae in visible and infrared light, and we thought we had a pretty full accounting of its ejected debris,” lead investigator Nathan Smith said. “But this new ultraviolet-light image looks astonishingly different, revealing gas we did not see in other visible-light or infrared images.”

Eta Carinae is known for its eruptions, which as per NASA, may be because of there being three stars being gravitationally within the same system. The newly founded gas might have been evicted out from the star just before it expelled the bipolar lobes on each of its side, and is thus, important to understand how the star’s eruption started.

The star first erupted 170 years ago, making it the second brightest star in the sky, but slowly faded over time. Since the star is located 7,500 light years away from Earth, these explosions happened 7,500 years ago and only become visible now, reported Science Alert.

Weighing over 150 times our Sun’s mass, Eta Carinae is predicted that it will likely die in a supernova explosion.