RCW58 & WR40

Let's travel to a star about 100 times more massive than our Sun, a million times more luminous and with a surface temperature 30 times higher. Such stars exist, some are known as Wolf-Rayet (WR) stars, after the names of French astronomers Charles Wolf and Georges Rayet. The star at the center of this image is WR 40, in the constellation Carina. Stars such as WR 40 live brightly and die young compared to the Sun. They quickly consume the hydrogen reserves in their core which fuse into heavier elements at the same time as they eject others through their stellar winds. In the case of WR 40, this star ejects particles at a speed of about 100 km/second, and these upper layers feed the expanding ovoid nebula RCW 58.