What will Eta Carina become when it goes supernova?

Even though Eta Carinae is more than 8,000 light-years away, features 10 billion miles across (about the diameter of our solar system) can be distinguished in the above Hubble Photograph.

Eta Carinae suffered giant outburst about 150 years ago, when it became one of the brightest stars in the southern sky. Though the star released as much visible light as a supernova explosion, it survived the outburst. Somehow, the explosion produced two lobes and a large, thin equatorial disk, all moving outward at about 1.5 million miles per hour. Estimated to be 100 times heftier than our Sun, Eta Carinae may be one of the most massive stars in our galaxy.

As one of the most massive stars in the Milky Way with over 100 times the mass of the sun, it has no choice but to become a black hole. When the star becomes a supernova in perhaps a few thousand years, it will be the brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon.

But the problem is that we now know something about the origins of gamma ray bursts. These are massive stars whose cores implode into a black hole and while the star is still intact, its core flattens into a spinning disk. Energy is beamed out of this disk, through the interior of the star, and erupts through the surface to create a burst of gamma rays that can be seen for billions of light years. If a planet happens to be located along this beam axis and within a few thousand light years of the star, its atmosphere MAY be destroyed by the beam of gamma rays and x-rays.

Fortunately for Earth, the rotation axis of Eta Carina is at about 45 degrees to our direction so we will miss all of the lethal excitement!