Eta Carinae

hypergiant binary inside the Homunculus Nebula

7,500 light-years from Earth

In the 1840s this star blew off ten Suns' worth of gas and briefly became the second-brightest star in the sky. That debris is the Homunculus. It may explode as a supernova or hypernova.

• two stars of ~90 and ~30 solar masses on a 5.5-year orbit
• their colliding winds glow in X-rays at 3,000 km/s

kind

star · explosion or collision