FUTURE EXPLORATION OF ETA CARINAE
There’s not much chance of humans ever sending a spacecraft to Eta Carinae. It’s 7,500 light years away, after all, so it’ll take a while for anyone to get there even if we somehow crack travel at the speed of light. This means astronomers are going to have to continue to monitor and study the star system from Earth, but that doesn’t mean we are settling for second best and that further breakthroughs are unlikely to happen. It’s quite the opposite, in fact. There have been many groundbreaking studies in just the past few years, and these have been shedding fresh light on Eta Carinae – quite literally in some cases.
The Hubble Space Telescope will certainly be keeping its beady eye on things for a while yet, while the NuSTAR space telescope may also potentially be able to give us more clues: in 2018 it found that the star system was accelerating cosmic ray particles to high energies at speeds comparable to light, for instance.
But what of newer telescopes? The James
Webb Space Telescope is due to launch in
October, and it will study infrared light from celestial objects. It will do so with greater clarity and sensitivity than telescopes today, and there are already plans to direct the telescope in the direction of Eta Carinae. The star system’s pillars of dust can be clearly seen in infrared light, so more information will surely be ascertained in the years ahead. Astronomers will also benefit from other telescopes, such as the Giant
Magellan Telescope, the Square Kilometre Array and the Extremely Large Telescope. These will prove essential for the studying of star systems and allow for a level of detail that could only be dreamed of not too long ago.