European Southern Observatory
Astronomers are still making new discoveries about the red giant star Betelgeuse, which experienced a mysterious “gloom” a few years ago. This fading is ultimately attributed to cold space and stellar “burbs” covered in interstellar dust. Now, new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories have revealed more about the pre-eclipse event.
Betelgeuse appears to have experienced a massive Surface Mass Injection (SME) event in 2019, which erupts 400 times the mass of our Sun during coronal mass ejections (CMEs). The magnitude of the phenomenon is unprecedented and indicates that CMFs and SMEs are different types of phenomena. New paper Posted on arXiv Physics last week. (It has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.)
Betelgeuse is a bright red star in the constellation Orion…One of the closest massive stars Towards Earth, about 700 light-years away. It is an ancient star that glows dull red and has reached an expanding stage, with a hot core that has only a weak gravitational hold on its outer layers. Nakshatra is like a heartbeat, albeit very slow and irregular. Over time, the star goes through periods of expansion and then contraction of its surface.
One of these courses is more regular and lasts more than five years. Along with this is a short, highly irregular cycle that lasts between a year and less than 1.5 years. Although rotations are easy to follow with ground-based telescopes, the changes do not cause drastic changes in starlight, which would explain the observed changes in the dimming phenomenon.
We have mentioned earlierAstronomers first noticed the strange and dramatic dimming of light Betelgeuse In December 2019, the star has faded so much that the difference is visible to the naked eye. The dimming continued, with a 35% dimming in mid-February before brightening again in April 2020.
Astronomers were puzzled by this phenomenon and wondered if it was a sign that the star was about to go supernova. After several months, they narrowed down the most likely explanations to two: a short-lived cool spot on the star’s southern surface (similar to a sunspot) or dust that makes the star appear darker to the eye. Spectators on the floor. last year, The purpose of astronomers It was dusty The main culpritAssociated with the narrow appearance of cold spots.
The ESO team concluded that the bubble of gas was ejected and pushed further by the outward pulsation of the star, like a stellar “burp.” When a cold spot from convection appeared on the surface, the local temperature drop was sufficient to condense heavy elements (such as silicon) into solid dust, forming a veil that obscured the star’s brightness in the southern hemisphere.
NASA/ESA/Elizabeth Wheatley (STScI)
According to the authors of this recent paper, this event was more than just a starburst. From the depths of the red giant’s interior, a large convection column with a diameter of more than a million kilometers erupted. The resulting shocks and pulsations were strong enough to generate EMS, throwing much of the star’s photosphere into space. This created a cold space covered by a cloud of dust, which explains the blackness.
The red giant is beginning to recover from this cataclysmic event. “Betelgeuse is doing some more unusual things at the moment; like a jump inside. Co-author Andrea Dupree said: From the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, comparing the activity with a group of Jell-O. As the photosphere begins its slow rebuilding process, its characteristic pulsation ceases as internal convection cells “oscillate like an unbalanced washing machine tub.”
“We’ve never seen such a large mass on the surface of a star before.” Dupree said. “We’ve left something that we don’t fully understand. This is a completely new phenomenon, using Hubble to directly observe and resolve surface details. We’re watching the evolution of stars in real time. The Internet Space Telescope Infrared light can detect ejected material as it moves away from the star, which can tell us more about what happened and its implications for other similar stars.
DOI: arXiv, 2022. 10.48550/arXiv.2208.01676 (About DOIs)
By image list ESO / p. Kervila / m. Montarges et al.
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