NASA's Hubble Space Telescope spotted the explosive red supergiant star Betelgeuse, effectively blowing its top in 2019. This marks the first time a surface mass ejection (SME) observation of a surface mass ejection (SME).
Our Sun occasionally ejects pieces of its fragile outer atmosphere, the corona, in an occurrence known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). However, the Betelgeuse SME discharged 400 billion times more mass than a typical CME.
State Of Bouncing
According to Andrea Dupree of the Center for Astrophysics, the enormous star is still rebuilding its strength following this tremendous event, with the interior of Betelgeuse in a current state of bouncing.
These new findings shed light on how red stars lose mass as they age and eventually explode as supernovae once their nuclear fusion furnaces run out of fuel. The amount of mass loss has a significant influence on their fate.
In order to create a clear narrative of a previously unseen colossal convulsion in an old star, Dupree pieces together all the various aspects of the star's previous strange behavior before, after, and during its eruption.
New spectroscopic and imaging data have been provided by the Hubble Space Telescope, the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory spacecraft (STEREO-A), the STELLA robotic observatory, and the Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph at the Fred L. Whipple Observatory, and the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO).
"We've never before seen a huge mass ejection of the surface of a star. We are left with something going on that we don't completely understand. It's a totally new phenomenon that we can observe directly and resolve surface details with Hubble. We're watching stellar evolution in real-time," Dupree said in a statement.
Recovering From Explosion
The massive outburst in 2019 may have been caused by a convective plume more than a million miles broad that was bubbling up from the star's core. By shooting the cooling part of the photosphere off with shocks and pulsations, the star was left with a cold surface region below the dust cloud it had produced.
Dupree said that Betelgeuse is presently having trouble recovering from this explosion.
The photosphere's fragments, which were around several times as heavy as our moon, shot off into space, cooled, and produced a dust cloud that covered the star from Earth-based astronomers' points of view, according to NASA.
The 400-day pulse rate of the supergiant has also stopped. Since around 200 years ago, astronomers have been tracking this cycle by analyzing changes in Betelgeuse's surface motions and brightness variations because its disturbance reveals the extent of the blast.
Convection cells within the star, which produce the regular pulsing, according to Dupree's theory, maybe sloshy like an uneven washing machine tub.
TRES and Hubble spectra show that the surface is still bouncing like a bowl of gelatin pudding as the photosphere reconstructs itself. However, the outer layers seem to be back to their normal appearance.
Betelgeuse has gotten so big that its surface would extend into Jupiter's orbit if it were to replace the Sun as the main star of our solar system. Dupree used Hubble in 1996 to identify several hot areas on the star's surface, which was also the first direct imaging of a star other than the Sun.
Related Article: [LOOK] NASA Hubble Space Telescope Finds A Dazzling Sea of Sequins
This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Joaquin Victor Tacla
