The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed two of the most massive stars in our galaxy as never before. Located 7,500 light years away from Earth in the Carina Nebula, these stars are rare ultra-hot, super-bright stars that emit primarily ultraviolet radiation, that gives them a blue hue.
WR25, the brightest of the stars, is actually a large star 50 times the size of our sun with another star half that size orbiting around it. To the upper left of WR25, the third brightest star in this image is really a triple star cluster. Two are so close together that telescopes with less resolution can't resolve them. The third star may take hundreds of thousands of years to orbit around them.
The second brightest star is actually a less massive star that appears bright because it is much closer to earth than the others.
Astronomers, led by Jesus Maiz Apellaniz at the Instituto de Astrofisico De Andalucia in Spain, believe radiation from the two star clusters may be causing a giant gas globule in the Carina Nebula to evaporate, inducing new stars to form and giving the globule its strange shape.
Hubble got back up and running in late October with its on-board back-up system after its primary camera malfunctioned. NASA is working to fix a spare system on the ground that could be delivered to the telescope by the space shuttle. A repair mission originally scheduled for October 14, before the breakdown, has been pushed back.
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