Le Cirque du Dédain

Unveiling the true face of Betelgeuse

State of the art observations reveal a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System, and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. This artist’s impression includes a scale in terms of the radius of Betelgeuse and the scale of the Solar System. Image: ESO/L. Calçada

Betelgeuse rides on the shoulder of the constellation known as Orion the Hunter. At 1,000 times the size of our Sun it is one of the biggest stars known and also one of the most luminous, emitting more light than 100,000 Suns put together. But such mightiness comes at a cost, for Betelgeuse will meet its fate in a spectacular supernova explosion at an age of only a few million years.

Giant stars like Betelgeuse shed the equivalent mass of the Earth every year, but the mechanism of how they do so is poorly understood. “We know relatively well how much mass supergiants loose, and how it ends up in the interstellar medium as planetary nebulae,” Pierre Kervella of the Paris Observatory tells Astronomy Now. “However, the mechanism of this mass loss is currently poorly understood, i.e. how physically the material escapes the gravitational field of the star.”

rest of the article at astronomynow.com