"The Blazing Eye of the Devil"... The Most Terrifying Astronomical Photo

Works jointly selected by NASA, ESA include pieces by Korean astronomers
"Looks like the gaze of the Halloween symbol Jack-o'-Lantern"

[Asia Economy Reporter Kim Bong-su] "Have you ever seen the blazing eyes of the devil?" It has been revealed that the 'scariest celestial photo' selected for this year's Halloween Day is the work of Korean astronomers.

According to the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute on the 28th, the NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) jointly operated Hubble Space Telescope Center (NASA·ESA Hubble Space Telescope) selected a photo capturing the light of a red giant star piercing through an interstellar nebula as this year's Halloween celestial photo to commemorate Halloween Day on the 31st of this month.

This photo was taken by an international joint research team led by Dr. Kim Hyo-seon of the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute using the Hubble Space Telescope, capturing the red giant star ‘CW Leonis (IRC+10216)’ located about 400 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the constellation Leo.

The powerful stellar wind emitted by the red giant forms a thick layer of ejected material around the star, which causes the star itself, buried at the center, to be invisible in the visible light spectrum. The starlight that breaks through this layer interacts with the surrounding area, creating a mysterious appearance. In this photo, the central shell layer of the star resembles the yellow eyes of a devil, and the outer shell layer looks like blazing smoke surrounding the devil’s eyes.

This photo draws attention because the beams of light emerging from the star’s center, described as the devil’s eyes, piercing through the surrounding material, operate on the same principle as the candlelight inside a ‘Jack-o’-lantern’ leaking through the eyes and mouth carved into its shell. A Jack-o’-lantern is one of the symbols of Halloween, made by carving a ghost face into a yellow pumpkin and placing a candle inside.

A red giant star is a star with a mass roughly that of the Sun that has evolved to the threshold of the ‘death of a star,’ a stage where most of the star’s internal material is returned to outer space. CW Leonis, observed this time, is one of the closest red giants to Earth and is a very important celestial object for red giant research.

This photo is a composite of observations of CW Leonis made by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2011 and 2016. Dr. Kim Hyo-seon’s research team at the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute focused on the scientific significance of the repeated ring structures in the outer shell layer, which may have caused the devil’s eyes to appear bloodshot and eerie, and the radial beams of light piercing through them. The team also discovered for the first time that the brightness at the center of CW Leonis increased sharply over a very short period, explaining that this was likely because the radial beams of light extending from the star’s center were almost aligned with the line of sight from Earth at the time of the 2016 observation. This research was published in June of this year in The Astrophysical Journal.

Dr. Kim said, “Using the high-resolution optical images from the Hubble Space Telescope, we studied a wide range from the center to the outer regions of CW Leonis and were able to find clues to unravel the complex structure of red giants, which have remained shrouded in mystery until now.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.