Giant star expels multiple dust shells
Wednesday, September 28, 2011 - 16:00
in Astronomy & Space
An international team led by Leen Decin, a K.U. Leuven (Belgium) astronomer, has discovered a series of dust shells in the vicinity of CW Leonis, a dying giant star. The star expelled the shells in the course of its long life: the most distant shell was expelled 16,000 years ago and, in that time, has drifted more than 7,000 billion kilometres from the star.