Betelgeuse Will Supernova!
By: Aubrey Pennington
A direct sky image of Betelgeuse. The star is shedding mass as it approaches exploding into a supernova.
(Image: © ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2. Acknowledgement: Davide de Martin)
Betelgeuse is a bright star located in Orion. It is
one of the largest known stars we have observed with a diameter of 700 times
the size of the Sun. That is a whopping 600 million miles in diameter. It is
classified as a red super giant and it is about 640 light years from Earth.
Betelgeuse has a surface temperature of 6000 degrees Fahrenheit (3,316 degrees Celsius)
which is less when compared to the Sun’s surface temperature of 10,000 degrees
Fahrenheit (5,538 degrees Celsius). This low temperature is what gives the star
its red glow. Betelgeuse is only a baby star compared to our Sun (4.6 billion
years old), at only 10 million years old.
So, what exactly is happening to Betelgeuse, well it
is about to go Supernova. Betelgeuse is shedding so much mass (seen in the
picture above). This phenomenon is known as Stellar Mass Loss. It is observed in
some massive stars where their mass is ejected into space. We do not know much
information as to why stars go through this phase but my speculation, after
reading different sources, is that once the stars run out of hydrogen to fuse
and begin to fuse heavier elements such as helium. This causes the star to
become hotter and it begins to swell. This causes the surface of the star to
become weak and it begins to leak mass through the surface and eject it into
space. But what we do know for sure, is that Betelgeuse is its final stages of
life. Looking at the track of a Sun with at least 25 times the mass we can see
that Betelgeuse is a Super red giant and we are expecting it to go supernova.
Betelgeuse began to shed its outer layers and we began measuring what we could
in 1993 for about 15 years. We noticed that Betelgeuse shed about 15 percent of
its mass in that short amount of time.
Dr Haley Gomez explains how Herschel will help us understand the life-cycle of stars
I have written a blog post on Supernovae here: Supernova. I will briefly
reiterate a little below:
The before a supernova can happen, the star must stop
fusing hydrogen at the core. It will expand and become a red giant and the core
will become hot enough to begin fusing helium into carbon. This process in massive
stars is like stars like our Sun. But this is where the similarities end. The
star will continue to fuse carbon into heavier elements such as oxygen, neon,
silicon, magnesium, sulfur, and finally iron. Once a star begins to fuse atoms
into iron, the star is at its end and it can no longer burin fuel. The star
then collapses under its own gravity and the iron core begins to heat up. In a
fraction of a second, the Earth sized iron core shrinks to about 6 miles across
(10 kilometers). The outer layers of the star will fall inwards onto the core
which will heat it to billions of degrees and then…. BOOM. The star explodes
releasing large amounts of energy and tons of materials into space forming
interstellar clouds. What remains of the star can form a neutron star or a
black hole depending on how massive the star was.
With all that said, we know what will happen to Betelgeuse,
but I am sure you want to know exactly how long that will be from now? The
number is difficult to gauge but the consensus from multiple sources say in
about 100,000 years Betelgeuse will go supernova.
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