Study of Supergiant Star Betelgeuse Unveils the Cause of its Pulsations and Other Metrics
AnonTechie writes:
Betelgeuse is normally one of the brightest, most recognizable stars of the winter sky, marking the left shoulder of the constellation Orion. But lately, it has been behaving strangely: an unprecedentedly large drop in its brightness has been observed in early 2020, which has prompted speculation that Betelgeuse may be about to explode.
To find out more, an international team of scientists, including Ken'ichi Nomoto at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), conducted a rigorous examination of Betelgeuse. They concluded that the star is in the early core helium-burning phase (which is more than 100,000 years before an explosion happens) and has smaller mass and radius-and is closer to Earth-than previously thought. They also showed that smaller brightness variations of Betelgeuse have been driven by stellar pulsations, and suggested that the recent large dimming event involved a dust cloud.
[...] Their results imply that Betelgeuse is not at all close to exploding, and that it is too far from Earth for the eventual explosion to have significant impact here, even though it is still a really big deal when a supernova goes off. And as Betelgeuse is the closest candidate for such an explosion, it gives us a rare opportunity to study what happens to stars like this before they explode.
That is a huge relief... what with COVID-19 and many other disasters, Betelgeuse exploding may have been the straw that broke the camel's back!
Also at: Phys.Org.
Journal Reference:
Meridith Joyce, Shing-Chi Leung, Laszlo Molnar, et al.Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: New Mass and Distance Estimates for Betelgeuse through Combined Evolutionary, Asteroseismic, and Hydrodynamic Simulations with MESA - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal (DOI: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/abb8db)
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