Nasa’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured red supergiant star “Betelgeuse” recovering slowly after blowing its top in 2019.
Hubble Space Telescope has captured the bright red supergiant star “Betelgeuse” recovering slowly after it had blown its top in 2019. The star has lost a significant portion of its visible surface causing a massive Surface Mass Ejection (SME). Andrea Dupree, from the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said, “Never before has a huge stellar surface mass ejection been seen. We are left with a situation that we don’t fully comprehend.”
As shared by Nasa, “Betelgeuse appears as a brilliant, ruby-red, twinkling spot of light in the upper right shoulder of the winter constellation Orion the Hunter.”
The new discoveries by Hubble Telescope gives insight into how red stars age, lose mass, and die. As per the report, Betelgeuse will eventually explode as a supernova when its nuclear fusion starts exhausting fuel. And when this happens, it will be so bright then that it will even be visible in the daytime sky from Earth, says the report.
Scientists and researchers have discovered that the star blew off a huge piece of its visible surface in 2019. Its eruption blasted around 400 billion times the mass of an ordinary CME and left a massive cool patch on its surface and a dust cloud all around it. As a result, Betelgeuse’s brightness decreased. It is a sign of a smaller explosion that had happened earlier. Though our Sun keeps ejecting its tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, also known as a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), but the Betelgeuse SME blast was 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME.
According to Nasa, this red supergiant star has swelled up to an astonishing diameter of approximately 1 billion miles. It is so huge that if placed at the center of our solar system it would reach out to the orbit of Jupiter.
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