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AG Carinae
is a
luminous blue variable star
in the constellation
Carina
. It is one of the
most luminous stars
in the
Milky Way
, although its great distance from Earth (20,000
light-years
) and intervening
interstellar dust
mean that the star is not usually visible to the naked eye; its
apparent brightness
varies erratically between magnitude 5.7 and 9.0. Apparently in a transitional phase between a massive
class
-O
blue supergiant
and a
Wolf–Rayet star
, AG Carinae is highly unstable and suffers from erratic pulsations, occasional larger outbursts, and rare massive eruptions. The star is surrounded by a
nebula
of ejected material at a distance of 0.4 to 1.2
parsecs
(1.3 to 3.9 light-years). The nebula contains around 15
solar masses
of material, all lost from the star around 10,000 years ago. This photograph of AG Carinae and its surrounding nebula was taken by the
Hubble Space Telescope
in 2021, as one of
its anniversary images
.
Photograph credit:
NASA
,
ESA
and the
Space Telescope Science Institute
Archive
–
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