The European Southern Observatory has released what it claims are “the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse”.
One team of scientists detected a plume of gas erupting into space from the surface of Betelgeuse on their image, which was created by combining several exposures into one super-sharp-shot (right).
However, this picture was still not sharp enough, as there is “a clear indication that the whole outer shell of the star is not shedding matter evenly in all directions,” according to study author Pierre Kervella (press release).
To determine why a sharper image was needed. So a second team combined the light from three 1.8-metre telescopes. This created an image with four times as much detail as the previous one. Based on this researchers decided that convection of gas in the star is likely to be behind the plume.
Avid readers of The Great Beyond may recall a minor flap in June over the possibility that Betelgeuse could be about to go supernova, based on the fact the giant star seems to be shrinking. So what do these new images tell us about the potential of impending Betelgeuse-related doom?
“We have actual images of this star and its surroundings and we see a large plume of gas that is extending into space from the surface of the star,” study author Jan Cami, of the University of Western Ontario, told the Calgary Herald.
“It’s an indication to us that the way stars lose mass has to do with the way energy is transported to the surface and that goes much more vigorously [here]. With more detailed observations, we might get an understanding of how these stars evolve and they become a supernova.”
The Times considers what this means for Sci Fi:
It is one of the most iconic stars in science fiction — home to Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect in The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the mother star of the original Planet of the Apes, and perhaps the setting for Rutger Hauer’s Blade Runner speech about “attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.”
While [the images] are great news for astronomy, however, they are perhaps rather less welcome for science fiction writers. It was already considered unlikely that life might exist around a red supergiant star like Betelgeuse, and the new insights into its bubbling surface and escaping cloud of gas make that prospect more remote still.
The teams’ research papers in Astronomy and Astrophysics are online here and here.
Image: ESO and P. Kervella