According to astronomers, the red giant star Betelgeuse, located in the Orion constellation, witnessed an explosion of a magnitude never seen before. Betelgeuse first attracted attention with an unexpected blackout at the end of 2019, and this darkening process continued throughout 2020.
Andrea Dupree of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics on Betelgeuse, which is about 700 light-years away from us, said, “We have never seen such a massive ejection on the surface of the star before. We were faced with something we did not fully understand.” said and added; “It’s a completely new phenomenon that we can directly observe with Hubble and work out the surface details. We monitor the evolution of stars in real time.”
600 times larger than the sun
Betelgeuse is a star that is hard to grasp. The diameter of the red giant is said to be 600 times larger than the diameter of the Sun. This means that if Betelgeuse were at the center of our Solar System, it would cover the area up to the orbit of Jupiter.
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Although Betelgeuse is a giant star, it is actually quite young. According to its type, the sun is middle-aged and approximately 5 billion years old. Betelgeuse, on the other hand, is older by species and is only 10 million years old. Moreover, scientists predict that within the next 100,000 years, the star will end its life with a supernova explosion.
400 billion times larger than explosions on the Sun
According to the latest research, the explosion in Betelgeuse caused about 400 billion times more mass ejection than the explosions in the Sun. We are actually familiar with these explosions from our own star. These explosions cause polar auroras and various radio distortions on our planet.
With this explosion in the star, millions of kilometers in length and several times the mass of the Moon were released into the depths of space. This cloud of dust, which explains the blackout a few years ago, is characterized as signals of a supernova event. Eventually, Betelgeuse will be visible in the sky even in the daytime when it explodes as a supernova.
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