One of the largest stars in the Orion constellation, the red supergiant Betelgeuse, just had a gigantic stellar outburst that has never been observed before, according to scientists.
Betelgeuse gained notoriety for the first time in late 2019 when the star, which gleams like a crimson diamond in Orion’s upper-right shoulder, unexpectedly darkened. In 2020, the supergiant continued to lose brightness.
Scientists have been attempting to find out what happened to the star since since some predicted that it would go supernova.
Now that data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories have been evaluated, scientists think the star had a gigantic surface mass ejection, shedding a significant portion of its visible surface.
“We’ve never before seen a huge mass ejection of the surface of a star. We are left with something going on that we don’t completely understand. It’s a totally new phenomenon that we can observe directly and resolve surface details with Hubble. We’re watching stellar evolution in real time.”
Andrea Dupree, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are periodic outbursts of the star’s corona, the outer atmosphere that surrounds our sun. In the event that this space weather affects Earth, satellite-based power systems and communications might be affected.
But compared to a typical coronal mass ejection from the sun, the surface mass ejection Betelgeuse underwent discharged more than 400 billion times as much mass.
image source : NASA
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