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Hubble Sees Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse Slowly Recovering After Blowing Its Top - HubbleSite

Hubble Sees Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse Slowly Recovering After Blowing Its Top - HubbleSite

Aug 11, 2022 1 min, 41 secs

The star Betelgeuse appears as a brilliant, ruby-red, twinkling spot of light in the upper right shoulder of the winter constellation Orion the Hunter.

Astronomers using Hubble and other telescopes have deduced that the star blew off a huge piece of its visible surface in 2019.

But those events are orders of magnitude weaker than what was seen on Betelgeuse.

Disruption of the Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse.

Analyzing data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories, astronomers have concluded that the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse quite literally blew its top in 2019, losing a substantial part of its visible surface and producing a gigantic Surface Mass Ejection (SME)!

But the Betelgeuse SME blasted off 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME.

Whipple Observatory's Tillinghast Reflector Echelle Spectrograph (TRES), NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory spacecraft (STEREO-A), NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, and the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO).

"We've never before seen a huge mass ejection of the surface of a star.

Weighing roughly several times as much as our Moon, the fractured piece of photosphere sped off into space and cooled to form a dust cloud that blocked light from the star as seen by Earth observers.

Though our Sun has coronal mass ejections that blow off small pieces of the outer atmosphere, astronomers have never witnessed such a large amount of a star's visible surface get blasted into space.

NASA's Webb Space Telescope may be able to detect the ejected material in infrared light as it continues moving away from the star.

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency).

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations.

Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore,

Disruption of the Red Supergiant Star Betelgeuse

Barbara Mikulski Donates Space Collection to Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore

The NASA Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA

AURA’s Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations

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