The star near Earth may be about to explode

When stars form they burn hydrogen, a process in which atoms of the element fuse to create a new element, helium. They do this for most of their lives, until they start burning other elements and eventually explode and die. A star that has been seen for a long time is undergoing this process and could soon explode.

The nearby star Betelgeuse, in the constellation of Orion, has been pulsing strangely, and in a paper, still in print, a group of scientists appears to have discovered the cause of the abnormal brightness.

Analyzes revealed that the star may be burning carbon, but it has already reached the end of that phase, and could soon transition into its hypervelocity phase and explode in a few decades.

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant that is sure to one day explode in a supernova, creating light comparable to the brightness of the full moon. This was thought to happen 100,000 years from now, or even a million years. However, the conclusion of this new study is very different.

Stars, after running out of hydrogen, begin to fuse helium into carbon, after which this new product turns into neon, sodium and magnesium, which is the carbon combustion stage. After successive fusions of these elements, iron comes in, and in a short time the star dies.

To estimate Betelgeuse’s remaining time, researchers need to know what stage it’s at, and the odds that it’s starting to finish burning carbon.

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star life

This is because the star was pulsating, swelling and contracting with changes in its brightness. Regular cycles of 185, 230, 420, and 2200 days and other less predictable variations were detected, and the article attempted to discover which of them is the radial fundamental mode (RFM), a period mainly related to the star’s radius.

If the RFM is 2,200 days as the researchers in this paper believe, instead of 420 as others believe, Betelgeuse could be much older than previously thought. And for its mass, this size, about 1300 times the mass of the Sun, indicates that it ends the combustion of carbon.

Even if it is not known how long it will take for a star to burn off the last carbon atom, it is known that after that it will only take a few decades for it to die.

This discussion of what Betelgeuse’s RFM is also refers to how far it is from Earth. Whether it’s a very large star, at 530 light-years away, or an outright giant at 900 light-years away. Whichever is true, we can celebrate being saved from the consequences of his death. The only thing we have to worry about is whether or not we’ll see her die anytime soon.

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