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A very interesting read for me today.
A team of international researchers have pieced together why this 'red giant' star in Orion ,at 643 light years away from Earth and the brightest star in Orion, suddenly dimmed in late 2019. It lost more than 2/3 of its brightness giving rise to speculation that it was near the end of its existance and would shortly become a spectacular supanova. Yesterday an answer was forthcoming from the team. A vast opaque veil of stardust formed and blocked out most of the light from this star. They used images from the VLT..Very Large Telescope situated in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, together with earlier images showing how the surface of the star was changing ,particularly in its southern hemisphere. The surface changes as vast bubbles of gas move,shrink and swell within the star. The conclusion is that sometime before the dimming a large gas bubble was ejected at a speed of about 200,000mph. When a patch of the gas bubble's surface cooled shortly afterwards the temperature decrease was enough for heavier elements, such as silicon, that were contained inside the bubble, to condense into solid particles dimming light from the star. The researchers were witnessing, in real time of a few weeks, the formation of stardust.Once the bubble of gas was millions of miles away from the hot star ..it's 6000 Fahrenheit ( 3315 C) it cooled and formed a dust cloud causing an apparant dimming of the star's light. Betelgeuse returned to its normal brightness by April last year. This theory has been backed up by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope by astronomers at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics which showed signs of dense ,heated material moving through the star's atmosphere in the months prior to the great dimming, as it's called. Andrea Dupree , one of the astronomers at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center said .t " Betelgeuse is a unique star, it is enormous and nearby and we are observing material directly leaving the surface of the supergiant.How and where material is ejected affects our understanding of the evolution of all stars "
A team of international researchers have pieced together why this 'red giant' star in Orion ,at 643 light years away from Earth and the brightest star in Orion, suddenly dimmed in late 2019. It lost more than 2/3 of its brightness giving rise to speculation that it was near the end of its existance and would shortly become a spectacular supanova. Yesterday an answer was forthcoming from the team. A vast opaque veil of stardust formed and blocked out most of the light from this star. They used images from the VLT..Very Large Telescope situated in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile, together with earlier images showing how the surface of the star was changing ,particularly in its southern hemisphere. The surface changes as vast bubbles of gas move,shrink and swell within the star. The conclusion is that sometime before the dimming a large gas bubble was ejected at a speed of about 200,000mph. When a patch of the gas bubble's surface cooled shortly afterwards the temperature decrease was enough for heavier elements, such as silicon, that were contained inside the bubble, to condense into solid particles dimming light from the star. The researchers were witnessing, in real time of a few weeks, the formation of stardust.Once the bubble of gas was millions of miles away from the hot star ..it's 6000 Fahrenheit ( 3315 C) it cooled and formed a dust cloud causing an apparant dimming of the star's light. Betelgeuse returned to its normal brightness by April last year. This theory has been backed up by observations from the Hubble Space Telescope by astronomers at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics which showed signs of dense ,heated material moving through the star's atmosphere in the months prior to the great dimming, as it's called. Andrea Dupree , one of the astronomers at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center said .t " Betelgeuse is a unique star, it is enormous and nearby and we are observing material directly leaving the surface of the supergiant.How and where material is ejected affects our understanding of the evolution of all stars "
