A photo of a red giant star taken by a research team at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute was selected for this year’s Halloween Astrophotography hosted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and others.
According to the Astronomical Observatory on the 29th, the ESA Hubble Space Telescope (ESA), jointly operated by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), will commemorate Halloween Day on the 31st, and this year’s Halloween astrophotography is the light of a red giant. We selected a photo that captures the penetration of this interstellar cloud (collections of gas, plasma, and cosmic dust seen in galaxies).
This photo was taken by an international joint research team led by Dr. Hyo-seon Kim, Moon-yeon Cheon, and the Hubble Space Telescope of the red giant ‘CW Leonis’ (IRC+10216), located 400 light-years away from Earth toward the constellation Leo.
Red giants are small to medium-sized stars that have reached the end of their life cycle.
About half of its mass is emitted and most of the material inside the star is returned to outer space, where the starlight from the powerful stellar wind emitted by the red giant interacts with the surrounding area, creating a mysterious appearance.
In this photo, the center of the star looks like a devil’s yellow eye and the outside looks like blazing smoke, as if light from a candle inside a jack-o-lantern carved with a ghost’s face is leaking out of the shape of the eyes and mouth. is reminiscent of For this reason, it was nicknamed ‘the devil’s eye’.
This image of the devil’s eye is a composite of CW Leonis observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011 and 2016.
The research team was the first to discover that the brightness of the CW Leonis center increased rapidly in a very short period of time, and the related research results were also published in The Astrophysical Journal in June.
Dr. Ho-gyu Lee said, “Based on the results of this study, we plan to add infrared and radio field observations using the radio telescopes ‘ALMA’ and the ‘Giant Magellanic Telescope’ (GMT) in the northern desert of Chile, in which the Astronomical Institute is participating. “It will contribute to the study of the formation and evolution of stars, including giant stars.”
(3)
