Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse recover slowly after it blew up its surface in 2019

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope observes that the red supergiant star Betelgeuse recovers after it blew a chunk from a plume more than a million miles across.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories, and astronomers concluded that the red supergiant star Betelgeuse had blown its top in 2019, losing a substantial part of its visible surface and producing a gigantic Surface Mass Ejection (SME).

According to NASA, the Sun routinely blows off parts of its tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, in an event known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). But the Betelgeuse SME blasted off 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME!

Andrea Dupree of the Center for Astrophysics said that the monster star is still slowly recovering from this catastrophic upheaval. Betelgeuse continues doing some very unusual things now; the interior is bouncing.

These new observations indicate how red stars lose mass late in their lives as their nuclear fusion furnaces burn out, before exploding as supernovae. The amount of mass loss significantly impacts their fate.

However, Betelgeuse’s surprisingly petulant behavior is not evidenced that the star is about to be blown up anytime soon. So the mass loss event is not certainly the signal of an imminent explosion.