The delicious Fried Egg Nebula, making astronomers hungry as we speak.
When it comes to stars, there are normal stars and there are the more unusual astronomical phenomenon. Among the more unusual things to be found within our great and beautiful universe, there’s the concept of the yellow hypergiant star. Think of the sun, then make it a star 1000 times as big as the sun and a staggering 500,000 times brighter. One such yellow giant has been dubbed the Fried Egg Nebula, because the star IRAS 17163-3907 looks like a gigantic fried egg. Let’s take a trip through the universe to locate the very delicious Fried Egg Nebula, shall we?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1br9cvisBbIPretty cool, right? The Fried Egg was discovered by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, which is located in Chile’s Atacama Desert. If you can spot the star from there, imagine how it’ll look if/when the Hubble Telescope gets its massive eye on the thing.
The yellow hypergiant star is interesting because they’re so large, they can’t retain their size. The Fried Egg Nebula looks the way it does because it’s a star in the midst of a crippling series of explosions, hence the ring of gas around the core of the star. Eventually, the Fried Egg will disappear completely after going supernova, but that’s probably a little far away.
Tags: astronomy, physics, IRAS 17163-3907, fried egg star, fried egg nebula, yellow hypergiant star, massive star looks like fried egg, European Southern Observatory, Very Large Telescope, Chile’s Atacama desert, star 1000 times bigger than the sun, star 500000 times brighter than the sun, giant yellow star looks like a fried egg, unusual stars, space
