New View of Doomed Star

The composite image of the Eta Carinae from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope shows the remnants of a massive eruption from the star during the 1840s. The X-ray data (yellow) show where material from that explosion has collided with nearby gas and dust. The optical data (blue) reveals material ejected from the star has formed a bipolar structure. Chandra detects a faint X-ray reflection off the inner optical nebula due to the collision of stellar winds between Eta Carinae and a suspected companion star. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/GSFC/M. Corocoran et al. Optical: NASA/STScI