Eta Carinae

This is essentially a copy of the original press release from 1996: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/1996/06/

Of course, one of the researchers is named "Ray".

I love http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism. :)

The idea of a spontaneous laser sounds surprising, but perhaps it shouldn't be. Some laser media have so much gain per distance, you get lasing without any optics - just pump energy into the system and it starts flashing.

Nitrogen lasers are like that. If you have a high voltage power supply, you could make a nitrogen laser in an afternoon, and no optics are required at all. Bonus: not even a container is required, since it can lase at room temperature and pressure, even when mixed with oxygen.

Besides the obvious possibilities (and implausibilities) of using something like this as an interstellar weapon, I wonder just how hard it would be to use a laser star to transmit general purpose power to, say, your home system, as a way of edging towards Kardashev 3, a really scaled up version of beaming power to earth from orbiting solar cells. Does such a concept work at all, in terms of real numbers, for a sufficiently patient society?