NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has delivered breathtaking close-up images of R Aquarii, a dynamic binary star system located about 700 light-years from Earth. This system exhibits violent eruptions, ejecting vast filaments of glowing gas and creating a striking spiral pattern in space, akin to a wildly spraying lawn sprinkler.
R Aquarii comprises a red giant star and a white dwarf, classified as a symbiotic star system. The red giant, a Mira variable, is over 400 times the size of our Sun, pulsating and fluctuating in brightness up to 750 times during its 390-day cycle, reaching nearly 5,000 times the Sun’s brightness at its peak.
The white dwarf siphons hydrogen gas from the red giant as it orbits every 44 years. This accumulated material ignites in a powerful nuclear fusion explosion, causing massive outbursts that propel filaments of plasma into space at speeds exceeding 1 million miles per hour. The energetic radiation from the stars energizes these filaments, causing them to glow vividly.
Hubble first observed R Aquarii in 1990, revealing two distinct stars approximately 1.6 billion miles apart. Recent timelapse observations from 2014 to 2023 showcase the dynamic evolution of the binary system and its nebula, highlighting its rapid brightness changes due to the red giant’s pulsations.
The scale of the ejected material is astounding, extending up to 248 billion miles from the stars, or 24 times the diameter of our solar system. Hubble’s ongoing studies of R Aquarii promise to enhance our understanding of such unique stellar phenomena.
For over three decades, the Hubble Space Telescope has been instrumental in advancing our knowledge of the universe. It is a collaborative effort between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), with operations managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and support from Lockheed Martin Space. Hubble’s science operations are conducted by the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.