For decades, researchers have known that it undergoes cycles of dimming roughly every days, during which it temporarily loses about one-quarter of its peak brightness. Mysterious faded star Betelgeuse has started to brighten again.
The unexplained dimming fuelled speculation that the star could be about to explode. This event would provide a spectacle the likes of which Earthlings have not seen in centuries: the last supernova in the Milky Way that could be observed from Earth was in , and Betelgeuse is so close to our planet that its supernova will be bright enough to be visible during daytime for weeks.
The star is around parsecs light years away, according to the most current estimates 2. But many astrophysicists warned that the supernova speculation was wishful thinking. Betelgeuse is more than 16 times the mass of the Sun, and times its width — so big that if it were located at the centre of the Solar System, it would engulf the orbits of all the planets up to Mars.
How to blow up a star. The images clearly showed that the bottom left-hand part of the star — as seen from Earth's Northern Hemisphere — had dimmed dramatically, and that the position of the darker region did not change substantially over the imaging period.
This indicated that the dim spot was caused by a cloud of dust that had been spewed by the star itself, and was moving roughly in the direction of the line of sight, rather than passing by. This enabled gas that the star had spewed out in the previous year to condense quickly into dust, blocking out light from the star. This scenario was the one that fit the data best, as the researchers confirmed by running more than 10, computer simulations. Nature , — US state, Canadian province, or country.
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Dave's Universe Year of Pluto. Groups Why Join? Astronomy Day. The Complete Star Atlas. Astronomers simulated what humans will see on Earth when the star Betelgeuse explodes as a supernova sometime in the next , years. A plume of gas nearly the size of our solar system erupts from Betelgeuse's surface in this artist's illustration of real observations gathered by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. Aboriginal Australians may have even worked it into their oral histories.
They also included observations gathered during Supernova A, which exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Supernova seen from Earth With all the speculation about what a Betelgeuse supernova would look like from Earth, University of California, Santa Barbara, astronomer Andy Howell got tired of the back-of-the-envelope calculations. This comparison image shows the star Betelgeuse before and after its unprecedented dimming. This collage zooms in on the constellation Orion left to one of the sharpest images ever taken of Betelgeuse far right.
A nearby supernova could have caused the Devonian mass extinction. When Betelgeuse goes supernova, can we safely observe it? Mysterious hot spots observed in Betelgeuse.
Related: The brightest planets in February's night sky: How to see them and when. Here's how to track down Betelgeuse: Once you go outside, give your eyes a few minutes to get adjusted to the darkness. Then turn to the southwestern sky in the Northern Hemisphere the northwestern sky in the Southern Hemisphere and look for the distinctive star pattern of Orion, centered on the three stars of its belt.
If you imagine Orion as its namesake, "the hunter," Betelgeuse marks the left-hand shoulder. The star is so bright and red, even in light-polluted areas , that you can't miss it.
Betelgeuse is easily visible to the eye, and you won't see much more detail using binoculars or a telescope. The star is so intriguing that the Hubble Space Telescope periodically turns its powerful gaze on Betelgeuse to see what scientists can learn. One particularly intriguing observation found a massive hotspot, the cause of which is still unknown, according to the European Space Agency.
During its current dimming spree, you can track Betelgeuse's activity and submit your observations to the American Association of Variable Star Observers to help the group gather more information on its variability.
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