First 'Twins' of Mysterious Erupting Star Found

A strange star that threw off huge amounts of gas and dust in a mammoth eruption more than 150 years ago isn't such an anomaly anymore. Astronomers have found five objects beyond the Milky Way galaxy that resemble Eta Carinae, a binary system composed of two enormous stars that lie 7,500 light-years from Earth. The larger of these two stars blasted out about 10 times the mass of the sun during a mysterious eruption in the 1840s, and the expelled gas and dust still cloak Eta Carinae like a veil.