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Betelgeuse is seen in the constellation Orion, the 10th brightest star in the sky, a red M-type giant: replaced by the Sun, it would extend somewhere beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Its distance has so far been estimated at 724 light years.
Photo: European Southern Observatory
Besides being relatively close and huge, another interesting thing about Betelgeuse is that, as a short-lived giant star, it walks at the end of its life. After its death, the core of the star collapses and transforms into a supernova accompanied by a huge explosion of energy.
Approached
According to research published by the Australian National University on Friday, Betelgeuse is slightly smaller than previously thought, seven hundred and fifty times the diameter of the Sun. The giant is also a quarter closer to 530 light-years than previously thought. thought.
We also publish in the article a hitherto raw dataset, collected by a lesser-known spacecraft. The solar mass ejection imager isn’t even designed for stargazing, but the brightest stars in the sky, including Betelgeuse, are in your images too, so you could measure how their brightness changes over time. From these data, we were able to calculate with greater precision than before in which time periods the star pulses (lights up-fades), and with this data we were able to select with great precision which models fit the star from the calculated ones.
– said László Molnár, researcher at the Miklós Konkoly Thege Astronomical Institute.
It’s not exploding now
In February 2019, the star’s light has been twice as severe, with a 25 percent fading, which many thought was the pre-wind of the impending supernova explosion. It was later revealed that this had been caused in part by a cloud of cosmic dust. New research prompted the Betelgeuse swan song a hundred thousand years ago.
One hundred thousand years is really an estimate of magnitude – it may already be ahead, it may be a little further back, so it may be only a few tens of thousands, it may be a hundred and fifty thousand – for a star, it is almost nothing . In the past, this was considered more likely, and after its brightness returned to normal in the middle of the year and we only saw the pulsation of the star again, it was certain that this fading was not the headwind of a supernova that was happening now.
– added László Molnár.
It is not good to be near a supernova. Such an event has caused a mass extinction at least once in Earth’s history. On the suggestion that if 2020 were golden by a devastating starburst near us, what to expect, the expert said:
Although according to our calculations it is a little closer than we thought so far, 530 light years is still a safe distance. Until the great Devonian extinction, if I look at it correctly, approx. The authors calculated a distance of 65 light years. So there is still much more.
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