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FOR RELEASE: 9:00 a.m. (EST) November 5, 1998

CONTACT: Yves Grosdidier
Universitie de Montreal, Montreal, Canada
(Phone: 514-343-6111, x5245)
(e-mail: yves@astro.umontreal.ca)

PHOTO NO.: STScI-PRC98-38


GREAT BALLS OF FIRE!
HUBBLE SEES BRIGHT KNOTS EJECTED FROM BRILLIANT STAR

Resembling an aerial fireworks explosion, this dramatic NASA Hubble
Space Telescope picture of the energetic star WR124 reveals it is
surrounded by hot clumps of gas being ejected into space at speeds of
over 100,000 miles per hour.

Also remarkable are vast arcs of glowing gas around the star, which are
resolved into filamentary, chaotic substructures, yet with no overall
global shell structure. Though the existence of clumps in the winds of
hot stars has been deduced through spectroscopic observations of their
inner winds, Hubble resolves them directly in the nebula M1-67 around
WR124 as 100 billion-mile wide glowing gas blobs. Each blob is about 30
times the mass of the Earth.

The massive, hot central star is known as a Wolf-Rayet star. This
extremely rare and short-lived class of super-hot star (in this case
50,000 degrees Kelvin) is going through a violent, transitional phase
characterized by the fierce ejection of mass. The blobs may result from
the furious stellar wind that does not flow smoothly into space but has
instabilities which make it clumpy.

The surrounding nebula is estimated to be no older than 10,000 years,
which means that it is so young it has not yet slammed into the gasses
comprising the surrounding interstellar medium.

As the blobs cool they will eventually dissipate into space and so
don't pose any threat to neighboring stars.

The star is 15,000 light-years away, located in the constellation
Sagittarius. The picture was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary
Camera 2 in March 1997. The image is false-colored to reveal details in
the nebula's structure.

Credit: Yves Grosdidier (University of Montreal and Observatoire de
Strasbourg), Anthony Moffat (Universitie de Montreal), Gilles Joncas
(Universite Laval), Agnes Acker (Observatoire de Strasbourg), and NASA