Strangely Behaving Red Supergiant Betelgeuse Smaller and Closer than First Thought
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for c0lo:
Strangely Behaving Red Supergiant Betelgeuse Smaller and Closer Than First Thought:
"It's normally one of the brightest stars in the sky, but we've observed two drops in the brightness of Betelgeuse since late 2019," [Dr. Meridith Joyce from The Australian National University (ANU)] said.
[...] "We know the first dimming event involved a dust cloud. We found the second smaller event was likely due to the pulsations of the star."
[...] According to co-author Dr. Shing-Chi Leung from The University of Tokyo, the analysis "confirmed that pressure waves - essentially, sound waves-were the cause of Betelgeuse's pulsation."
"It's burning helium in its core at the moment, which means it's nowhere near exploding," Dr. Joyce said.
[...] Co-author Dr. Laszlo Molnar from the Konkoly Observatory?in Budapest says the study also revealed how big Betelgeuse is, and its distance from Earth.
"The actual physical size of Betelgeuse has been a bit of a mystery - earlier studies suggested it could be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter. Our results say Betelgeuse only extends out to two thirds of that, with a radius 750 times the radius of the sun," Dr. Molnar said.
"Once we had the physical size of the star, we were able to determine the distance from Earth. Our results show it's a mere 530 light years from us - 25 percent closer than previously thought."
The good news is Betelgeuse is still too far from Earth for the eventual explosion to have a significant impact here.
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: 10.3847/1538-4357/abb8db)
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