Why Betelgeuse Dimmed universetoday storybywill
. These observations revealed that in 2019, Beteleguese “blew its stack” and released a tremendous amount of material into space.
Like a CME, this massive ejection was likely caused by a buoyant jet of superheated material bubbling up from deep inside the star . This plume is estimated to have been measured more than a million kilometers across and several times as mass as our Moon. So great were the shocks and pulsations that it was enough to blast off a sizeable patch of material from Betelgeuse’s outer shell .
What’s more, the shock caused by this event is something Betelgeuse still hasn’t fully recovered from. The supergiant’s 400-day pulsation rate is now gone , something astronomers have not seen in almost 200 years of observations. The sudden disappearance of this variability in brightness and surface motions is further evidence of how disruptive this blowout was. As Dupree explained in a recent NASA“Betelgeuse continues doing some very unusual things right now; the interior is sort of bouncing.
This illustration plots changes in the brightness of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse, following the titanic mass ejection of a large piece of its visible surface. Credits: NASA/ESA/Elizabeth Wheatley These observations could yield fresh clues about how red stars lose mass late in their lives as their nuclear fuel is slowly exhausted, eventually culminating in a supernova. How much mass they shed as they near the end of their Red Giant phase would have a significant effect on their fate. In addition, the way this event completely dwarfs ejections from the Sun’s corona could suggest that SMEs and CMEs are separate classes of stellar events.
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