Great New Image: Fried Egg Nebula

This is the best picture ever taken of a yellow hypergiant. Astronomers used ESO's Very Large Telescope for the image.

ScienceDaily — Astronomers have used ESO's Very Large Telescope to image a colossal star that belongs to one of the rarest classes of stars in the Universe, the yellow hypergiants. The new picture is the best ever taken of a star in this class and shows for the first time a huge dusty double shell surrounding the central hypergiant. The star and its shells resemble an egg white around a yolky center, leading the astronomers to nickname the object the Fried Egg Nebula.

Credit: ESO/E. Lagadec