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Astronomers have been watching Betelgeuse closely for a few years now, expecting it to explode and go nova any time. The red supergiant forming the right shoulder of Orion came close a few years ago, with a mass ejection of plasma that makes our worst solar storm look tame. Surprisingly, since 2019, the star appears to have healed up nicely.
Betelgeuse recovering well
One of the reasons Betelgeuse is such a popular star is because it’s one of the easiest to locate in the night sky. It forms the right shoulder of Orion, which means its on your left as you look up from Earth.
In 2019, the red supergiant class star “experienced a massive stellar eruption – the likes of which have never been seen before.” It caught everyone’s attention when it dimmed down significantly.
The supergiant continued to grow dim in 2020 prompting astrophysicists to predict Betelgeuse would “explode as a supernova.” That’s even bigger than an ordinary nova. They have “been trying to determine what happened to it ever since.”
A team of astronomers got their hands on some “data from the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories.” Once they crunched the numbers into useful form they realized “the star experienced a titanic surface mass ejection, losing a substantial part of its visible surface.”
According to Andrea Dupree, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “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.”
Betelgeuse gave them “a totally new phenomenon that we can observe directly and resolve surface details with Hubble.”
Stellar evolution in real time
The most exciting part about the whole thing with Betelgeuse right now is that “we’re watching stellar evolution in real time.” Here on Earth, the sun regularly shoots out “coronal mass ejections in which the star releases parts of its outer atmosphere, known as the corona.”
We had a minor one disrupting satellites and other electronics last week. Even the “Carrington Event” which happened 1859 that caused sparking and even fires in multiple telegraph stations was nothing, compared to this.
The surface mass ejection Betelgeuse experienced “released more than 400 billion times as much mass as a typical coronal mass ejection from the sun.”
This gives astronomers the perfect chance to “watch what happens late in the lifetime of a star.” It already burned through most of the fuel in it’s core, causing it to swell into the red supergiant it is now.
When all that matter collapses back down, there will be one heck of an explosion. “Ultimately, the star will explode in a supernova, an event that could be briefly visible during the daytime on Earth. Meanwhile, the star is experiencing some fiery temper tantrums.”
It shot off a chunk bigger than our moon which cooled and “blocked the star’s light when viewed through telescopes on Earth.” Now, they say Betelgeuse is recovering. Still, it “continues doing some very unusual things right now.“
