In 2019, one of the brightest stars visible to the naked eye dimmed in the sky. The red supergiant of Orion, which has behaved strangely for thousands of years, is now finally approaching the final stage of its life. The "Great Eclipse" happened to him, and he lost two-thirds of his usual brightness. Astronomers have determined that Betelgeuse is ready to become a supernova. However, by the end of 2020, the star began to shine at its usual brightness.
A scientist studying this strange darkening phenomenon says Betelgeuse's strange behavior still won't stop: the inner layers of its stellar material seem to be bouncing. What astrophysicists see directly and in detail using the Hubble telescope is a completely new phenomenon to them, which they do not fully understand. This could be a real-time stellar evolution.
Astrophysicists gathered information from all the observatories that observed Betelgeuse. This gives them a chance to get a full picture of what happened to the star and what the consequences are. As it turned out, the star spewed out a huge amount of gas. Part of the photosphere, several times heavier than the Moon, escaped into outer space, leaving a cool place in its wake.
Once the ejected gas enters outer space, it cools and condenses into dust. It was this cloud of dust that blocked Betelgeuse's light for a while. The clouds stretch for more than 1.6 million kilometers.
The star still feels the echoes of such a powerful coronal ejection. It emits 400 times more than ordinary solar energy. Before all this happened, Betelgeuse had been pulsating, first darkening, then brightening. This cycle lasted 400 days. Now the pulsation is gone. Astrophysicists believe this is temporary. Cosmologists have found that convective cells inside the star are still active, which violates this pattern.
The eruption itself still doesn't prove that Betelgeuse is turning into a supernova. Its study is important for understanding the process by which stars lose mass. When this star dies in the star**, we will see the light it emits even during the day. The good thing is that this star is too far away from us: we are 548 light-years away from this dying giant, which guarantees the safety of the solar system. According to the latest research, Betelgeuse is about 100,000 years away from a supernova explosion.
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