Betelgeuse has hit the headlines in recent weeks as astronomers noticed that it was gradually dimming.
In essence, the star is approaching the dimmest points in … Betelguese is the red star in the top right quarter of … They discovered a mass of bright, hot material moving outward from the southern hemisphere of the star at around 200,000 miles per hour and eventually being ejected into space. The Betelgeuse star spot would be a hundred times larger than the Sun. If you dropped it into our solar system, it would swallow Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.A NASA graphic showing how a dust cloud might obscure the view of Betelgeuse.The Hubble observations suggest differently. Betelgeuse, the red supergiant star that acts as the shoulder of Orion in his constellation, is having a moment. "This material was two to four times more luminous than the star's normal brightness," said Andrea Dupree, associate director at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author on the study.Dupree and her team believe this material may have begun to cool down as it moved through space, forming a dense dust cloud that partially obscured Betelgeuse. Did Betelgeuse fade due to supersized sunspots? Betelgeuse's weird dimming caused by gigantic starspots Space.com 13:12 1-Jul-20. Researchers have been monitoring the star for years, but in … Guinan suspects that Betelgeuse is dramatically dimmer now because two of its cycles are overlapping at minimal brightness. There is no risk to Earth, but Betelgeuse will brighten enormously for a few weeks or months.It should be visible in daylight and could be as bright as the Moon during night time.Because it takes about 500 years for the light to reach us, we would be viewing an event that had happened centuries in the past.Various scenarios have been put forward to explain the recent changes in the brightness of the star.Astronomers have previously considered that dust produced by the star was obscuring it, causing the steep decline in brightness.Red giants exhibit a behaviour known as pulsation, caused by changes in the area and temperature of the star's surface layers. The puzzling diminishing of probably the most splendid star in the sky, which created a ruckus among space-watchers toward the finish of 2019, may now have a clarification. by Daniel Brown, The Conversation.
The asymmetries led the authors to conclude that there are huge star spots,https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53218658.Read about our approach to external linking. These are external links and will open in a new window.Astronomers say big cool patches on a "supergiant" star close to Earth were behind its surprise dimming last year.Red giant stars like Betelgeuse frequently undergo changes in brightness, but the drop to 40% of its normal value between October 2019 and April 2020 surprised astronomers.Researchers now say this was caused by gigantic cool areas similar to the sunspots seen on our own parent star.There had been speculation that Betelgeuse was about to go supernova.But the star instead began to recover and by May 2020 it was back at its original brightness.Betelgeuse, which is about 500 light-years from Earth, is reaching the end of its life. But it's not known precisely when it will explode; it could take as long as hundreds of thousands of years or even a million years.When the giant star does run out of fuel, however, it will first collapse and then rebound in a spectacular explosion. We delete comments that violate.© CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.Discuss: NASA telescope uncovers the cause of Betelgeuse's mysterious dimming,had been puzzled by its mysterious dimming,published in The Astrophysical Journal on Thursday. It is a supergiant star growing a super-sized star spot." "Corresponding high-resolution images of Betelgeuse from December 2019 show areas of varying brightness. The wavelength of this radiation is a thousand times greater than that of visible light.This part of the electromagnetic spectrum is particularly good for observing the distribution of cosmic dust.
Pulsations can eject the outer layers of the star with relative ease.The released gas cools down and develops into compounds that astronomers call dust.To test the dust idea, the astronomers used the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) in Chile and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.