Edmond Halley first discovered the star Eta Carinae in 1677. At first it wasn’t that special, it was a magnitude 4 star located in the Carina constellation in the Southern Hemisphere. However, people started to take notice when it kept changing its brightness. First, getting dimmer but then brightening and it has continued to brighten for several hundred years. Nowadays it is known as the brightest star in our galaxy. It has a mass more than 100 times the mass of the sun and is more than three million times brighter. Eta Carinae was thought to be at the limit of how large and how luminous a star can be; well there’s a new star giving Eta Carinae a run for its money.

A star nicknamed the “Peony Nebula Star” may be the new reigning champ for the title of brightest star in the galaxy. It has so far been estimated at 3.7 million times as bright as the sun, or 3.7 million solar luminosities. However, the mass seems to beat Eta Carinae, weighing in at 150 to 200 solar masses. Now this isn’t a newly discovered star, we’ve known that this star existed for some time, but had no idea about its astounding qualities. Peony is buried deep in the galaxy center where it was obscured from our telescopic eyes by gas, dust, and other types of interstellar medium. It was only recently with the help of the NASA Spitzer space telescope that we were able to peer through all of that and see the true star that lied beyond it all.

Spitzer was able to accomplish this because it is an infrared telescope and because it is a space telescope. Peony’s optical light is absorbed in all the interstellar gas and dust so we are not able to see it well on earth, but we would be able to see it’s infrared light. However, Earth’s atmosphere absorbs a very large majority of infrared radiation that comes to us, thus ground based telescopes are not able to see the infrared light from Peony. Spitzer solves these problems by being both above the atmosphere and an infrared telescope.

People first thought that stars like Eta Carinae were rare. This is because of something called the Eddington Limit. The Eddington Limit is a theoretical limit on the size and luminosity of a star, saying that if a star is much larger than about 100 solar masses the outward pressure of the radiation literally blows the star apart. And we now know that Eta Carinae is actually blowing itself apart. But now we may have to question how rare these stars really are and what the size limit really might be. As Spitzer continues to probe the center of the galaxy, where more of these monsters are thought to be hiding, we may have to change what we thought we knew about these massive fireballs.

It has been nearly three months now since GLAST was launched, NASA’s Gamma-ray Large Area Telescope. The telescope isn’t fully functional right now, but according to NASA’s website the telescope is up and running and so far passing all of the checks the engineers are laying out.

Gamma rays are some of the most powerful and mysterious objects detected in space so far. As their name entails they are short-lived bursts of gamma ray photons, having energies ranging from a thousand electron volts to several billion electron volts. They range in duration from a few tenths of a second to a few minutes. However, this very short duration makes them very hard to detect and gather data on, since by the time a telescope is alerted to a burst and pointed in the right direction the burst will be over.

Gamma ray bursts are not well understood. They weren’t discovered until the 1960’s, and as late as the 1990’s astronomers weren’t even sure if these bursts were coming from the edge of the solar system or the edge of the universe. However, with recent advancement in technologies we’ve been discovering much more about them, giving us clues to their origin. We now know there are two different classifications of gamma ray bursts. Long Duration ones are bursts lasting 2 seconds to a few minutes, short duration ones are shorter than 30 seconds. Astronomers think fundamentally different processes create them. Long bursts are believed to be generated billions of light years away by the death or collapse of very massive stars, or Wolf Rayet stars. Short bursts are less understood, but may be created in very high energy collisions like between two neutron stars or a neutron star and black hole.

GLAST will be able to cover much more of the sky than the current gamma ray satellite, SWIFT. The GLAST team is currently in the process of checking the validity of the burst locations it detects. So far, GLAST has detected 12 bursts, and other telescopes have so far verified four of these bursts. Once all the checks have been performed and the team operations are running smoothly GLAST should start making some great discoveries. It will be able to gather data on a much higher number of bursts and tell us about the area from which they originated. Matching up the bursts with data about the originating area from before the bursts will hopefully tell us more about how they are created, such as if a known super giant star is in the vicinity of the bursts before but not after the burst.

New technology for this purpose is quite exciting. There are so many strange and mysterious things in the Universe we still don’t understand; to have something that may lead to a new discovery in astronomy is thrilling. It will be important to keep an eye on the data coming in once GLAST really gets going.