One of the brightest stars in the sky just exploded

According to Cnet, the red giant Betelgeuse is at the end of its life, according to the cosmological time standard. Since 2019, astronomers have been using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories to hypothesize that we are about to observe the star's explosion.

After analyzing the data, scientists at the Harvard and Smithsonian Centers for Astrophysics determined that only part of the surface of Betelgeuse exploded, sending large amounts of matter into space. The star's supernova explosion, if it had occurred in the past, would not have been observable from Earth.

In 2019, researchers called the eclipsed Betelgeuse star event a 'surface mass ejection' (SME), similar to Solar Storms, when the star ejects matter into space. time. Each Solar Storm typically causes auroras and radio disruptions on Earth.

However, the explosion on the surface of the star Betelgeuse is estimated to be about 400 billion times more massive than an average surface mass eruption.

Image of the star Betelgeuse partially exploding on the surface, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

'We have never seen such a massive ejection on the surface of a star. There's something going on that we don't fully understand."

'It's a new phenomenon that we can only observe and interpret in surface details through the Hubble telescope. The team is also monitoring the evolution of stars in real time," said Andrea Dupree, an astronomer at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

In addition, as the star is in its final stages, its diameter continues to expand dramatically, with an estimated number of about one billion miles. If we place the star Betelgeuse in the position of the Sun, it will expand beyond the orbit of Jupiter.

Super bright stars like Betelgeuse have relatively short lifespans. Specifically, the Sun is in the "middle-aged" stage with 5 billion years old. In contrast, stars like Betelgeuse only have a lifetime of about 10 million years. Therefore, scientists predict a supernova explosion could occur in the next 100,000 years.

2019 image of the star Betelgeuse from the Hubble telescope.

Betelgeuse was once one of the 10 brightest stars in the sky when viewed from Earth. The explosion on the surface created a cloud of dust around the star, making the image captured in 2019 significantly blurred. For months in 2019 and 2020, scientists speculated the dimming could be a precursor to a star becoming a supernova, a phenomenon in which a star explodes at the end of its life.

Finally, the proof of the giant explosion was presented. Ms. Dupree added that if the star Betelgeuse fully exploded, we could observe it directly from Earth, even during daylight hours.

The last stellar explosion in the Milky Way, recorded by astronomer Johannes Kepler, occurred in 1604. According to records from that time, humans could see a bright light in the sky for about 3 hours. week. The star SN 1604 is about 20,000 light-years from Earth. Meanwhile, the distance from Betelgeuse to Earth is 10 times closer than the explosion of 1604.