On Friday, NASA astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at one of the brightest stars in our galaxy to commemorate the 31st anniversary of its launch. It's called AG Carinae and it's about 20,000 light-years away. It's not just a bright spot in the sky; it's a glowing gas-and-dust nebula fighting to keep itself from exploding. The star began forming about 10,000 years ago through an eruptive phase and is expected to last just a few years, compared to our Sun's nearly 10-billion-year lifespan.
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched on April 24, 1990, and is still in use, capturing breathtaking celestial images. The AG Carinae is one of the largest and brightest stars in the galaxy. NASA tweeted an image taken in ultraviolet light, which provides a much clearer picture of the star's dust structures. Hubble is well-suited to observations of ultraviolet light.
NASA describes these stars as having a dual personality and calls them the luminous blue variables. They are inactive for a long time before erupting in an impatient outburst.
These stars are continually fighting to maintain equilibrium between the radiation pressure bound outward and gravity pushing in due to their size and extremely high temperatures. Radiation often triumphs, causing the star to explode in a volcanic eruption. These stars regain some composure after the outburst and become quiet for a while.
According to NASA, AG Carinae has also gone through this phase of two forces pushing it in opposing directions, but its outbursts have been less aggressive than its peers.
The luminous blue variables are important to astronomers because they have far-reaching effects on their surroundings, but they're hard to come by: only around 50 have been discovered. These stars are in this process for thousands of years, and many of them die in titanic supernova explosions, enriching the universe with heavier elements than iron.
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