Tag: Betelgeuse news January 3 4 August 14 2020 Two Moons Hawking Remembrance Light Ride Space Science Magellanic Cloud Supernova in February 1987 Neutrinos Valentines 2020

Just As We Saw With Betelgeuse, On The Shoulder Of Orion Last Year… Dimming, In A Super Massive Star

~ condor ~ Leave a comment

This is… excellent.

Beauty on a staggeringly-vast scale. And as lethal as anything we will ever see, in the known Universe.

Take a look — via Hubble’s news release tonight:

“…The red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris — which is far larger, more massive, and more violent than Betelgeuse — experiences much longer, dimmer periods that last for years. New findings from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope suggest the same processes that occurred on Betelgeuse are happening in this hypergiant, but on a much grander scale.

“VY Canis Majoris is behaving a lot like Betelgeuse on steroids,” explained the study’s leader, astrophysicist Roberta Humphreys of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis….

The enormous red hypergiant is 300,000 times brighter than our Sun. If it replaced the Sun in our own solar system, the bloated monster would extend out for hundreds of millions of miles, between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.

“This star is absolutely amazing. It’s one of the largest stars that we know of — a very evolved, red supergiant. It has had multiple, giant eruptions,” explained Humphreys.

Giant arcs of plasma surround the star at distances from it that are thousands of times farther away than the Earth is from the Sun. These arcs look like the solar prominence from our own Sun, only on a much grander scale. Also, they’re not physically connected to the star, but rather, appear to have been thrown out and are moving away….”

The first panel of four images, at right above is Betelgeuse. Loving this. . . simply loving it — for even as stars die, we know inexorably new ones. . . are ever being born. And, ultimately, all from the same primordial matter. Smile.

नमस्ते

[O/T] Interstellar Science: Mighty Betelgeuse May Be Dimming, Anew, Here In August 2020… Super-Nova Soon?

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All stars, it seems, hum… to a rhythmic celestial vibration, of sorts — the melody of which most of us are only dimly aware. Especially so, the hottest… deep copper-red ones.

We have mentioned this oddity before — most recently, on Valentine’s 2020 — and now there is a pretty clear scientific explanation for the February 2020 observed data.

Since Betelgeuse of late has been very close to our own Sun’s corona in the sky, from the angle of our Earth observatories, we haven’t had data on it, since early summer. But STEREO, our space based telescope was… watching it.

And it seems to have begun a noticeable dimming, again here in late July to August. We will be able to see it from Earth based telescopes, starting in late August — but this “dimming return period” is much shorter than those previously-observed (a 400-plus day cycle — while this is less than 120 days) between such events. So it may be that these “super flares” are accelerating in frequency.

Here’s just a bit, from ScienceAlert.com (do go read it all):

…STEREO’s measurements revealed that Betelgeuse is dimming again — an unexpected development so soon after its last dim period. Betelgeuse typically goes through brightness cycles lasting about 420 days, with the previous minimum in February 2020, meaning this dimming is happening unexpectedly early. These observations were reported by the science team via The Astronomer’s Telegram on July 28, 2020. This is an intriguing phenomenon that scientists will study with additional Earth-orbiting and ground-based observatories when Betelgeuse returns to the night sky in late August….

We once again needed to get well off-world, this morning — with all the ugliness that is Trump. Even so, our children — or theirs — may yet see this mighty star go supernova, in their life-times. And that makes me grin — as they will see perhaps a year or more of two very bright stars — even in daylight.

नमस्ते