All Things Homunculus

Abstract

The ``Homunculus'' nebula around Eta Carinae is one of our most valuable tools for understanding the extreme nature of episodic pre-supernova mass loss in the most massive stars, perhaps even more valuable than the historical light curve of eta Car. As a young nebula that is still in free expansion, it bears the imprint of its ejection physics, making it a prototype for understanding the bipolar mass loss that is so common in astrophysics. The high mass and kinetic energy of the nebula provide a sobering example of the extreme nature of stellar eruptions in massive stars near the Eddington limit. The historical ejection event was observed, and current parameters are easily measured due to its impressive flux at all wavelengths, so the Homunculus is also a unique laboratory for studying rapid dust formation and molecular chemistry, unusual ISM abundances, and spectroscopy of dense gas. Since it is relatively nearby and bright and is expanding rapidly, its 3-D geometry, kinematics, and detailed structure can be measured accurately, providing unusually good quantitative constraints on the physics that created these structures. In this chapter I review the considerable recent history of observational and theoretical study of the Homunculus nebula, and I provide an up-to-date summary of our current understanding, as well as areas that need work.