Saturday, October 01, 2011

Rare Yellow Hypergiant Star Discovered


What is hugely larger than our sun, set to shortly explode in a mind numbingly powerful explosion, has rings of ejected material with the mass of four of our own sun and..... wait for it.....Yellow! Hard to believe but this weird creature is indeed a super massive star on the fast tract to a super nova.

This star is in a very rare class called a hyper-giant. These stars are so massive that it is impossible to maintain their massive outer layers for not much longer than a few hundred million years before the outer layers crash down onto the core causing a titanic explosion.

In this infrared photo captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope array you can see the bright central star with the two huge ejection rings.

from the Daily Galaxy

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