Mira (pronounced “my-rah”) is a red giant star over 400 light-years away in the constellation of Cetus. NASA’s Galaxy Evolution Explorer probe recently took the amazing ultraviolet picture below:
Over the last 30,000 years Mira has been throwing off layers of stellar material as it runs out of fuel, creating a tail thirteen light-years long. That’s a tail more than 76,000,000,000,000 miles long!
why has it only thrown this stuff out in one direction?
or has this star actually been moving like a comet….
Exactly – it’s moving through space leaving this trail behind it.