Hubble sees the giant star Betelgeuse recovering from the explosion

Red Giant Betelgeuse It is slowly recovering from a catastrophic explosion in which it lost much of its surface. NASA reported the intriguing bright star rehabilitation process on Thursday (11).

Astronomers noticed that Betelgeuse erupted in 2019 while analyzing data from Hubble Space Telescope And many other observatories. The star produced a massive surface mass ejection (EMS), something unprecedented in the behavior of a Ordinary star.

The explosion released a mass 400 billion times greater than the mass of a typical EMS. “We’ve never seen a massive mass ejection from the surface of a star. We let something happen that we didn’t fully understand.” report Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts, USA. “It’s an entirely new phenomenon that we can observe and resolve surface details directly using Hubble.”

a Sun It is also routinely exposed to events like this, where parts of its fragile outer atmosphere, the corona, explode. Although the Star King is subject to mass ejections from this corona, astronomers have never seen such a large amount of the visible surface of the star thrown into space as was the case with Betelgeuse.

According to scientists, the mass ejection of the star is likely caused by the convection plume, which is more than a million miles in diameter, rising from the depths of the star. As a result, the shocks blew off a piece of the photosphere in starwhich leaves you with a large cold surface under a cloud of dust.

This cloud blocked the light from Betelgeuse that Earth watchers saw, Blackout generation, started in late 2019. The loss of brightness lasted for a few months, and was easy to notice even by backyard monitors.

According to Duprey, convective cells can move inside the star, which drives the regular pulse. However, the observations indicated that the outer layers may return to normal, even though the surface still bounces back like a gelatin plate while the photosphere rebuilds itself.

Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky, and it can be easily found on the right shoulder of Orion. The Giant’s 400-day heart rate has now stopped – perhaps temporarily. The star’s behavior, according to astronomers, is not evidence that it will fully explode anytime soon.

A mass loss event is not necessarily a sign of an impending explosion. Dupree is now collecting data on Betelgeuse’s behavior using various tools. New Hubble observations are already providing hints about how red stars lose mass towards the end of their lives, as their fusion furnaces burn out, before exploding like supernovae.