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Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse.
ALMA (ESO / NAOJ / NRAO) / E. O’Gorman / P. Kervella
If you’re experiencing the creepy sensation of someone breathing down your neck, it could be Betelgeuse. The Infamous Star – Subject of an Exciting supernova discussion will it or won’t it earlier this year, it may be much closer to Earth than we suspected.
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant and is monstrous compared to the size of our sun. A study published in The Astrophysical Journal this week reveals some new calculations of the star’s mass and distance, and gives us an estimate of when it is likely to go supernova.
Speculation about the Betelgeuse explosion accelerated as the star went through some strange bouts of dimming and brightening beginning in late 2019. Scientists believe that dust cloud caused one of these events. “We found that the second smallest event was likely due to the pulsations of the star,” lead author Meridith Joyce said in a statement from the Australian National University (ANU) on Friday.
The science team used models to determine what was happening to the pulsations, and traced it back to what co-author Shing-Chi Leung of the University of Tokyo described as “pressure waves, essentially sound waves.” This activity helped the researchers discover where the star is in its life cycle.
Scientists had previously estimated this as the size of Betelgeuse compared to our solar system, but the new study revises that estimate.
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The result is that Betelgeuse is not in danger of going supernova anytime soon. It could easily be 100,000 years before it reaches that stage. This is according to what other scientists have suggested.
The study also revolutionizes our understanding of the size of the star. “The actual physical size of Betelgeuse has been a bit of a mystery: previous studies suggested it could be larger than Jupiter’s orbit. Our results say that Betelgeuse only extends to two-thirds of that, with a radius 750 times the radius of it. sun, “said co-author Laszlo Molnar of the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest.
With the improved size of Betelgeuse, the team was able to make a more accurate estimate of its distance from Earth, placing it about 530 light-years away, or about 25% closer than previously known. That’s far enough away that Earth is not damaged by the future Betelgeuse explosion.
“It’s still a big problem when a supernova goes off. And this is our closest candidate. It gives us a unique opportunity to study what happens to stars like this before they explode,” Joyce said.
