November 9, 1998
The story of your birthday began billions of years before calendars existed, in furnaces of light and clouds of dust.
WR124: Stellar Fireball
Birthday · November 9, 1998
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published November 9, 1998. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Some stars explode in slow motion. Rare, massive Wolf-Rayet stars are so tumultuous and hot they are disintegrating right before our telescopes. Glowing gas globs each over 30 times more massive than the Earth are being expelled by a violent stellar wind. Wolf-Rayet star WR124, visible near the image center, is thus creating the surrounding nebula known as M1-67. Why this star has been slowly blowing itself apart over the past 10,000 years remains unclear. WR124 is 15,000 light-years away towards the constellation of Sagitta.