Why You Need To Look Very Carefully At Hubble’s Jaw-Dropping New Image For Halloween
The Hubble Space Telescope is celebrating Halloween by releasing new images of a spooky “orange eye” peeking out of a cosmic cloud.
The eye in question is CW Leonis, a carbon star in the constellation of Leo, the lion.
Look closely at the main image, above, and you’ll see that not only is CW Leonis itself an incredible sight, but around it are countless distant galaxies.
Why is CW Leoni's orange? Why is it shrouded? And what’s going on with all of those galaxies? The explanation is eye-opening ...
What is a carbon star?
It’s a red giant star whose atmosphere contains more carbon than oxygen. While many stars in the night sky can look white, yellow, blue and orangey to the naked eye or through binoculars/telescopes, few are as reddish as carbon stars.They look that way because red giant stars have stopped generating energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium and instead convert helium nuclei into carbon.
All that carbon makes it way to the outer layers of the massive star, through which only reddish light—which has a longer wavelength—can penetrate.
What and where is CW Leonis?
About 400 light-years from us in the constellation Leo, CW Leonis is a carbon star only a few times the mass of the Sun that has expanded to hundreds of times its size. It’s now enveloped by a particularly turbulent cloud of sooty dust.
The closest carbon star to us, CW Leonis displays unexplained beams of starlight—very obvious in this new image—which have changed in shape in the last 15 years. That’s a blink of an eye in astronomical terms. It’s thought that it may have a binary companion star.
However, zoom-in on the main image and you’ll see something else incredible—galaxies. Dozens of them.
Leo and its ‘realm of galaxies’
Between the bright stars Denebola and Regulus in Leo, the Lion—roughly the location of CW Leonis—there is a mass of galaxies. That’s because when you stargaze in the direction of Leo you’re looking in the opposite direction to the center of the Milky Way—you’re looking into proper deep space.
The M96 or Leo I Group of galaxies is a cluster of about nine galaxies around 30 million light-years from Earth. All are just a small part of what’s known as the “local group” of galaxies close to our home, the Milky Way.
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
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