Astronomers Discover A Fried Egg

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Fried Egg nebula cracks open

rare hypergiant star

First came the “Running Chicken” nebula, and now comes a cosmic “Fried Egg.”

A European telescope captured the best image yet of one of the rarest classes of stars in our universe. Astronomers playfully point out that the cosmic hypergiant resembles an egg white around a yolky center—a fried egg. Yellow hypergiants are not only rare, they last just a few million years, so finding one is no small feat.

Fried Egg Nebula

Astronomers must have been pretty hungry the day they first saw this new picture of the star IRAS 17163-3907 taken with ESO’s Very Large Telescope: They dubbed it the Fried Egg Nebula. This astronomical pheomenon is the clearest image yet taken of this image. The nebula reveals a massive star lies at the center of two huge, nearly spherical shells of debris.

The star and shells together make up the nebula: their combined shape inspired the breakfast-food “fried egg” moniker.

This new image allows astronomers to view a yellow hypergiant, a rare type of star on an evolutionary path to death by supernova. Although the anomalous image is faint in visible light. The nebula is 13,000 light-years away; the brightly glowing star was discovered in 1983 using infrared rays in the constellation Scorpius.

This new discovery shows that the star is about 20 times as massive as the sun and shines roughly 500,000 times brighter.

The dusty double shells indicate that the star is ejecting bursts of material—approximately four times the mass of the sun in the space of just a few hundred years. This sort of activity is a sure sign that the star is in its death throes.

When stars ten times as massive as the sun or more run out of hydrogen, they then use burning helium. This causes the stars to swell into red supergiants. (The bright star Antares is another famous example of a red supergiant.) When the star uses up the helium as an energy source, a supergiant star burns progressively heavier elements until it builds up a mostly iron core, at which point the core collapses, triggering a Type II supernova.

In rare instances, red supergiants can evolve further prior to explosion and become an active yellow hypergiant, becomes a luminous blue variable, and then a Wolf-Rayet star, characterized by fierce stellar winds ejecting material in all directions at 300 to 2,400 kilometers a second.

The research team believes the Fried Egg Nebula won’t be long until it explodes—or maybe it already has and we haven’t seen it yet.


Mad Mike’s America thanks National Geographic for the release of information about the Fried Egg Nebula discovery today.

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Dorothy Anderson

I want to know what you think and why, especially if we disagree. Civil discourse is free speech: practice daily. Always question your perspective.
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12 years ago

I did not have time to read the whole article, but I did read the title.

Were these astronomers in my kitchen yesterday?

BigHarryH
12 years ago

That is one fabulous picture. Isn’t science wonderful.

12 years ago

Sunny side up. I’m a breakfast man.

Reply to  Holte Ender
12 years ago

I dunno, Holte. The nebula looks a little to runny for me…

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