ANALYSIS: One of the brightest stars in the sky is evolving and dying before our eyes
Nothing lasts forever, including the stars in our night sky. One of the brighter and more notable stars in our sky is Betelgeuse, the bright red supergiant in the shoulder of Orion.
In late 2019, astronomers around the world grew giddy with excitement, because we saw this giant star get fainter than we've ever seen it before. Since Betelgeuse is at the end stages of its life, there was some speculation this might be a death rattle before the end.
We don't fully understand what caused this SME, but if they have similar progenitors to the coronal mass ejections we've seen on our own Sun, they might be caused by the destabilisation of large-scale magnetic structures in theArtist’s impression of the aftermath of the surface mass ejection, with the mass cooling and forming a cloud of dust which dimmed the star for a short period of time. The plot below outlines the real and expected brightness changes of Betelgeuse during this time.
It is suspected that Betelgeuse lost a large part of its surface material in this remarkable event. In fact, the amount of material ejected is the single largest SME event we've ever seen on a star, in modern astronomy.times more mass than a typical event on other stars. This is multiple times the mass of the Moon, pushed out at incredible speeds.Betelgeuse is much like an astronomical jack-in-the-box.
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