“We see this all the time in red supergiants, and it’s a normal part of their life cycle,” says Levesque. We think it is possible that a dark cloud resulted from the outflow that Hubble detected.”.
“With Hubble, we see the material as it left the star’s visible surface and moved out through the atmosphere, before the dust formed that caused the star appear to dim,” said lead researcher Andrea Dupree, associate director of The Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. All other explanations are simply reaching for nebulous conclusions and have no basis in fact. And then, about a month later, the southern hemisphere of Betelgeuse dimmed conspicuously as the star grew fainter. Another posited that huge convection cells within Betelgeuse had drawn hot material up to its surface, where it had cooled before falling back into the interior. Das Bildmaterial darf nur in Zusammenhang mit dem Inhalt dieser Pressemitteilung verwendet werden.

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook. “Red supergiants will occasionally shed material from their surfaces, which will condense around the star as dust. The observations, taken with the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in January and December 2019, show how much the star has faded and how its apparent shape has changed. New observations by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and the robotic STELLA telescope of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP) now provide an explanation for the phenomenon. https://www.aip.de/en/news/science/mysterious-dimming-of-betelgeuse, https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2020/news-2020-44, https://www.spacetelescope.org/news/heic2014/, https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2020/nasa-satellite-s-lone-view-of-betelgeuse-reveals-more-strange-behavior/. By April 2020, the star had returned to its normal brightness. Late last year, news broke that the star Betelgeuse was fading significantly, ultimately dropping to around 40% of its usual brightness. “Red supergiants will occasionally shed material from their surfaces, which will condense around the star as dust.

The material then passed through the hot atmosphere to the colder outer layers of the star. The pulsation rippling outward from Betelgeuse may have helped propel the outflowing plasma through the atmosphere. If one of these massive cells had risen to Betelgeuse’s surface, the study authors would have registered a substantially greater decrease in temperature than what they see between 2004 and 2020. The findings will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. But the star’s dimming, which began in October 2019, wasn’t necessarily a sign of an imminent supernova. But the star’s dimming, which began in October, wasn’t necessarily a sign of an imminent supernova, according to Massey. Thanks to new observational data obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, an international team has now identified a dust cloud as the probable cause of the dimming: Scientists believe that the star unleashed superhot plasma from an upwelling of a large convection cell on the star's surface, similar to rising hot bubbles in boiling water, only many hundred times the size of our Sun. Some astronomers think the sudden dimming may be a pre-supernova event. During the autumn months of 2019, Hubble detected dense heated material passing from the star’s surface into its outer atmosphere. the star might have been dimming in preparation of going supernova, Jupiter and Orion shine over Canary Islands in dazzling night-sky photo, Bright star Betelgeuse might be harboring a deep, dark secret, Dying star Betelgeuse keeps its cool ... and astronomers are puzzled, On This Day in Space: Oct. 18, 1963: Félicette Becomes the 1st Cat in Space! The material then passed through the hot atmosphere to the colder outer layers of the star. At a distance of about 725 light years, the star is relatively close to our solar system. Measuring a star’s temperature is no straightforward task. It would therefore not have been able to show what STELLA observed, and certainly not a reversal of the plasma velocity when the star was faintest,“ Strassmeier concludes. The latter is very slow and takes many years. 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However, in a new paper, astronomers provide evidence to support the idea that Betelgeuse isn't about to explode. “It absorbs certain wavelengths of light, leaving telltale ‘scoops’ in the spectrum of red supergiants that scientist can use to determine the star’s surface temperature.”. Thanks to new observational data obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope, an international team has now identified a dust cloud as the probable cause of the dimming: Scientists believe that the star unleashed superhot plasma from an upwelling of a large convection cell on the star’s surface, similar to rising hot bubbles in boiling water, only many hundred times the size of our Sun. Image credit: NASA / ESA / E. Wheatley / STScI Astronomers expect Betelgeuse's core to collapse, and for the star to go supernova, within the next 100,000 years. Betelgeuse shines as a bright star in the constellation Orion. But this fading was so intense that astronomers quickly took notice and began observing the star intensely, trying to figure out what was going on. In autumn 2019, a sudden darkening of the star began, which was first visible from Earth through telescopes and later even to the naked eye – and was initially a mystery to science. Between October 2019 and February 2020 the brightness of the star Betelgeuse has dropped by more than a factor of three. Perhaps the star Betelgeuse isn’t dimming because it’s about to explode—it’s just dusty. The star was expanding in its cycle at the same time as the convective cell was upwelling.