Hubble has observed that Supergiant Betelgeuse, which blew its top, is gradually making a full recovery
The bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse practically blew its top in 2019, losing a sizable piece of its visible surface and producing a large Surface Mass Ejection, according to data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and a number of other observatories (SME). This has never before been seen in a star’s behavior. The occurrence known as a Coronal Mass Ejection occurs frequently, and it involves the sun ejecting portions of its thin outer atmosphere, called the corona (CME). However, compared to a typical CME, the Betelgeuse SME discharged 400 billion times more mass.
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse…
This supergiant star experienced a huge mass ejection of its visible surface back in 2019 – something never before seen in a normal star’s behavior.
Hubble observations are giving clues about this stellar mystery: https://t.co/iyfQbYt0Bt pic.twitter.com/bfsqX0iGrZ
— Hubble (@NASAHubble) August 11, 2022
After this awful disturbance, the huge star is still rebuilding its strength. The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian’s Andrea Dupree claims that Betelgeuse’s interior is currently sort of bouncing. These new findings shed light on how red stars lose mass as they age and eventually explode as supernovae when their nuclear fusion furnaces run out of fuel. The amount of mass loss has a significant influence on their fate. Betelgeuse’s exceptionally rude behavior is also not a hint that the celebrity is about to become popular overnight. Consequently, a significant loss event is not always a sign of a coming explosion.
The celebrity’s defiant behavior before, after, and during the eruption is being pieced together by Dupree into a coherent story of a hitherto unheard gigantic convulsion in an elderly star. New spectroscopic and imaging data have been provided by the STELLA robotic observatory, the Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph (TRES) at the Fred L. Whipple Observatory, the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory spacecraft (STEREO-A), the Hubble Space Telescope, and the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). Dupree emphasizes how crucial the Hubble data were in aiding in the puzzle’s solution.
The colossal outburst in 2019 may have been caused by a convective plume that was boiling up from the star’s innards and measuring more than a million miles across. Shocks and pulsations blasted off the cooling component of the photosphere, leaving the star with a substantial cold surface region beneath the dust cloud it had produced. Betelgeuse is now having trouble recovering from this wound.
The star was hidden from Earth-based observers by a dust cloud created by the shattered photosphere, which was roughly several times as heavy as our moon. The fading, which began in late 2019 and continued for a few months, was plainly discernible even by backyard observers who observed the star’s brightness change. One of the sky’s brightest stars, Betelgeuse, may be found in Orion’s right shoulder. Even more remarkable, the 400-day pulsation rate of the supergiant has vanished. Since around 200 years ago, astronomers have been tracking this cycle by analyzing changes in Betelgeuse’s surface motions and brightness variations. Its disturbance reveals the extent of the blast.
Convection cells within the star that produce the regular pulsing, according to Dupree’s theory, may be swirling around like an uneven washing machine tub. According to TRES and Hubble spectra, the surface is still bouncing like a bowl of gelatin pudding as the photosphere reconstructs itself. However, the outer layers appear to be returning to normal.
Even while the sun occasionally suffers coronal mass ejections that blast off small fragments of its outer atmosphere, astronomers have never witnessed such a large percentage of a star’s visible surface get thrown into space. As a result, surface mass ejections and coronal mass ejections can happen independently of one another. 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. Hubble was used by Dupree in 1996 to discern between several hot areas on the star’s surface. It was the first direct imaging of a star other than the sun.
As the ejected material continues to move away from the star in infrared light, NASA’s Webb Space Telescope may be able to see it.
