Betelgeuse's Interior Behaving Mysteriously After The Titanic Outburst In 2019, is this a Pre-supernova Event?

Illustration credit: NASA, ESA and E. Wheatley


In 2019, NASA observed something interesting happening with our neighbor star Betelgeuse, Analyzing data from Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories NASA found that the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse quite literally blew its top. Astronomers said, "this is something never before seen in a normal star's behavior." In an unexpected event called Surface Mass Ejection (SME), Betelgeuse lost a substantial part of its visible surface.

We are familiar with the word called Corona Mass Ejection (CME), in this event our Sun routinely blows off parts of its tenuous outer atmosphere. But Betelgeuse SME blasted off 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME!

In 2019 Betelgeuse witnessed a titanic outburst it was possibly caused by a convective plume. This event created shocks and pulsations that blasted off the chunk of the photosphere leaving the star with a large cool surface area under the dust cloud that was produced by the cooling piece of the photosphere. Betelgeuse is now struggling to recover from this Surface Mass Ejection.


Credit: NASA, ESA, Elizabeth Wheatley (STScl)

The above image shows changes in the brightness of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse, following the titanic mass ejection of a large piece of its visible surface, and that escaping material cooled to form a cloud of dust that temporarily made that star look dimmer, as seen from earth.

Recently NASA observed that the monster star is still slowly healing from this catastrophic upheaval. 'Betelgeuse continues doing some very unusual things right now; the interior is sort of bouncing," said Andrea Dupree of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Astronomers said these observations yield clues as to how red stars lose mass late in their lives as their nuclear fusion furnaces burn out, before exploding as supernovae. However, Betelgeuse's surprisingly petulant behavior is not evidenced the star is about to blow up anytime soon. So the mass loss event is not necessarily the signal of an imminent explosion.

But still, "no one knows what a star does right before it goes supernova, because it's never been observed," Dupree explained. "Astronomers have sampled stars maybe a year ahead of them going supernova, but not within days or weeks before it happened. But the chance of the star going supernova anytime soon is pretty small."

Betelgeuse is destined to end its life in a supernova blast. Some scientists think the sudden dimming may be a pre-supernova event. Betelgeuse is relatively nearby, around 725 light-years away, which means the dimming would have happened around the year 1300. But its light is just reaching Earth now.

In the future NASA's Webb Space Telescope will detect the ejected material in infrared light as it continues moving away from the star.