Bask in the Explosive Brilliance of the Fried Egg Nebula

There’s a curious breed of person who wanders the world’s beaches and mini-malls, in all of their leathery, charred glory: the tanning addict. No matter how many hours they bake, basted in oil, the Sun simply isn’t strong enough for them.

Luckily, science has once again found a solution to life’s problems. A team of astronomers have just imaged one of the brightest stars in the visible universe, with a shine 500,000 times brighter than our Sun. Even better, it looks like a fried egg.

In a paper published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, a team led by Eric Lagadec of the European Southern Observatory named the hypergiant star the Fried Egg Nebula, thanks to the swirling cloud of gas that surrounds it. First discovered in 1983, the star was simply known as IRAS 17163-3907 until Lagadec’s team was able to study it more closely and give the nebula system a name. It’s one of the 30 brightest stars visible in our sky. Of those, it’s the closest at only 13,000 light years away.

Despite its size and brightness, the star hadn’t been looked at closely in a couple of decades. Giving it a gander with the ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the team was able to study its characteristics and take a proper mug shot using the the telescope’s infrared camera.

“This object was known to glow brightly in the infrared but, surprisingly, nobody had identified it as a yellow hypergiant before,” Lagadec said.

Hypergiants, aside from sounding cool, are really, really big stars. According to a 2001 paper by Richard B. Stothers and Chao-wen Chin, yellow hypergiants are believed "to be the cores of massive stars that have recently evolved out of a much cooler red supergiant state." The yellow hypergiants are so bright in part because they are extremely volatile. Stothers and Chin describe them as showing "strongly turbulent photospheres and high rates of mass loss." In other words, yellow hypergiants are constantly blasting bits of themselves off into the universe at an impressive clip.

The Fried Egg Nebula fits that bill. The star itself is about a thousand times bigger in diameter than the Sun. The massive nebula surrounding the star is even bigger; if you think of the distance from Earth to the Sun as the radius of Earth’s orbit, the nebula’s radius is 10,000 times larger. Which is to say, if the Fried Egg Nebula was our star, Earth would be smack-dab in the middle of it and the nebula would expand beyond Neptune.

It’s also explosive as hell. Lagadec’s paper states that the star, despite being so large, is only 20 times the mass of our Sun. It’s already ejected material weighing the equivalent of four Suns in the last couple hundred years.

Like anything else that’s supremely self-destructive, the star likely doesn’t have much life left. The Fried Egg Nebula is doomed to die in a brilliant supernova sometime in the–astronomically speaking–near future.