Betelgeuse Suffered A Titanic Eruption

Credits: Science Publication: NASA, ESA, STScI, y Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Massachusetts)

Who can not recognize the Orion nebula in the winter sky? With three very bright stars forming its belt, it is one of the easiest constellations to find.

The star Betelgeuse is above the belt, on what would be the hunter’s right shoulders. This star appears as a bright and flickering ruby-red point of light, making it easy to understand that it is a red giant star.

In its life stage as an aging star, this star has swollen to a diameter that, compared to our solar system, would reach the orbit of Jupiter. We know that when this star dies it will be in a spectacular way as a supernova. Waiting for that moment, astronomers have been watching it closely, first finding that Betelgeuse varies in luminosity rhythmically within a 400-day period, However, most recently astronomers identified, with the space telescope Hubble, a tremendous explosion that produced a mass ejection from its surface. The amount of mass ejected is 400 billion times more than what is observed in a normal star.

The first hint that something spectacular happened was due to the mysterious dimming of the star in late 2019. The star was obscured by the formation of an immense cloud of dust, formed by the ejected mass as it cooled. Betelgeuse is slowly recovering and the photosphere is rebuilding, but the material inside continues to rumble, disrupting the star’s normal cycle.

These observations give clues as to how red giant stars lose their mass as their fuel runs out, shortly before exploding as a supernova. The loss of mass affected its behavior, but this does not indicate that it is about to explode.

The team of astronomers led by Dr Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts will analyze this and other data obtained from the star in order to better understand this behavior.