V385 Carinae, Wolf-Rayet Star
The red-colored object in this infrared image from NASA's WISE is a sphere of stellar innards, blown out from a humongous star. The star (white dot in center of red ring) is one of the most massive stellar residents of our Milky Way galaxy. Objects like this are called Wolf-Rayet stars, after the astronomers who found the first few, and they make our sun look puny by comparison. Called V385 Carinae, this star is 35 times as massive as our sun, with a diameter nearly 18 times as large. It's hotter, too, and shines with more than one million times the amount of light. Fiery candles like this burn out quickly, leading short lives of only a few million years. As they age, they blow out more and more of the heavier atoms cooking inside them - atoms such as oxygen that are needed for life as we know it. The material is puffed out into clouds like the one that glows brightly in this WISE image. In this case, the hollow sphere showed up prominently only at the longest of four infrared wavelengths detected by WISE. This image mosaic is made up of about 300 overlapping frames. V385 Carinae is located in the Carina constellation, about 16,000 light-years from Earth.
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Photo credit: © Photo Researchers / Alamy / Afripics
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Keywords: astronomical, astronomy, body, carina, carinae, celestial, constellation, deep, detectors, explorer, heavenly, infrared, massive, mission, object, resident, science, sky, space, star, stellar, survey, v385, wide-field, wise, wolf-rayet
