Related papers: A High-Resolution Study of Eta Carinae's Outer Eje…
$\eta$ Carinae is an extremely luminous and energetic colliding-wind binary. The combination of its orbit and orientation, with respect to our line of sight, enables direct investigation of the conditions and geometry of the colliding…
Ejecta knot flickering, ablation tails, and fragmentation are expected signatures associated with the gradual dissolution of high-velocity supernova (SN) ejecta caused by their passage through an inhomogeneous circumstellar or interstellar…
Sub-arcsecond resolution Chandra observations of Eta Carinae reveal a 40 arcsec X 70 arcsec ring or partial shell of X-ray emission surrounding an unresolved, bright, central source. The spectrum of the central source is strongly absorbed…
I discuss some observational properties of aspherical nebulae around massive stars, and conclusions inferred for how they may have formed. Whether or not these ideas are applicable to the shaping of planetary nebulae is uncertain, but the…
We have observed Eta Carinae over 34 nights between 4th January 2009 and 27th March 2009 covering the estimated timeframe for a predicted spectroscopic event related to a suspected binary system concealed within the homunculus nebula. A…
Context : If relativistic particle acceleration takes place in colliding-wind binaries, hard X-rays and gamma-rays are expected through inverse Compton emission, but to date these have never been unambiguously detected. Aims : To detect…
Recently Supernova 2006gy was noted as the most luminous ever recorded, with a total radiated energy of ~10^44 Joules. It was proposed that the progenitor may have been a massive evolved star similar to eta Carinae, which resides in our own…
Cosmic-ray acceleration has been a long-standing mystery and despite more than a century of study, we still do not have a complete census of acceleration mechanisms. The collision of strong stellar winds in massive binary systems creates…
Conditions within the Homunculus nebula around Eta Car are determined by many of the same physical processes that occur in molecular clouds in the interstellar medium. But there is one major exception -- we know when the ejection occurred…
The X-ray emission from the super-massive star Eta Carinae is simulated using a three dimensional model of the wind-wind collision. In the model the intrinsic X-ray emission is spatially extended and energy dependent. Absorption due to the…
The core of the nebula surrounding Eta Carinae has recently been observed with VLT/NACO, VLTI/VINCI, VLTI/MIDI and VLTI/AMBER in order to spatially and spectrally constrain the warm dusty environment and the central object. Narrow-band…
High resolution near-infrared adaptive optics imaging and polarimetry have been obtained of the Homunculus Nebula and its central star Eta Carinae (HD 93308). Maps of the linear polarization at a resolution of <0.2'' have been made in the…
While SN impostors resemble the Great Eruption of eta Car in the sense that their spectra show narrow H lines and they have typical peak absolute magnitudes of -13 to -14 mag, most extragalactic events observed so far are quite different…
The most massive binary system Eta Carinae has been recently established as a gamma-ray source by the AGILE and Fermi-LAT detectors. The high energy spectrum of this gamma-ray source is very intriguing. It shows two clear components and a…
Images of the complex circumstellar nebula associated with the famous red supergiant VY CMa show evidence for multiple and asymmetric mass loss events over the past 1000 yrs. Doppler velocities of the arcs and knots in the ejecta showed…
During $\eta$ Car's spectroscopic event in mid-2003, the stellar wind's bright H$\alpha$ and H$\beta$ emission lines temporarily had a distinctive shape unlike that reported on any previous occasion, and particularly unlike the 1997--98…
Context. Colliding-wind binaries are massive stellar systems featuring strong, interacting winds. These binaries may be actual particle accelerators, making them variable gamma-ray sources due to changes in the wind collision region along…
We present initial results from JWST NIRSpec integral field unit observations of the nearby Supernova (SN) 1987A. The observations provide the first spatially-resolved spectroscopy of the ejecta and equatorial ring (ER) over the 1-5 \mu m…
The binary system $\eta$ Carinae is a unique laboratory in which to study particle acceleration to high energies under a wide range of conditions, including extremely high densities around periastron. To date, no consensus has emerged as to…
Eta Carinae is the colliding wind binary with the largest mass loss rate in our Galaxy and the only one in which hard X-ray emission has been detected. Eta Carinae is therefore a primary candidate to search for particle acceleration by…