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No Longer AloneHubble spots Eta Carinae, a massive binary star system about 7,500 light-years away from Earth that inexplicably, powerfully erupted in the 1840s. New telescope surveys reveal that Eta Carinae has five “twins” in other galaxies.
Photograph by NASA, ESA and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team

Week’s Best Space Pictures: Erupting Superstar Gets Siblings

NASA’s Curiosity rover spots Martian dunes of gray sand, and a nearby supermassive black hole starts burping.

ByMichael Greshko
January 8, 2016

Feed your need for heavenly views of the universe with our pick of the most awe-inspiring space pictures. This week, stars zooming through space push arcs of glowing gas, satellites capture El Niño’s unusual global impacts on winter weather, and astronomers indirectly spot dark matter in a enormous galaxy cluster 10 billion light-years away.