
The red giant is exploding waiting to happen. They are at the end of their lives. reddened and swollen as they fused the heavier elements in a last-ditch effort to keep them from collapsing. but in the end Gravity will win and the Red Giant Core will collapse. cause supernoah We know it will happen. But until recently we don’t know when
The most famous red giant is Betelgeuse, a bright red star in the constellation Orion. About 550 light-years away and about 18 times the size of the Sun, it is the closest red giant to Earth. and when it finally exploded It will momentarily be brighter than the moon. This, of course, caused some celebrity speculation. Will it explode in our lifetime? it already exploded And are we waiting for the Super Noah light to reach us? And every astronomer says it’s not true. But we really don’t know. But a new study could warn us a few months before Betelgeuse explodes.
There are two general models for the red supergiant supernoʋae. Both predict that the red supergiant should dim considerably before exploding. On very different time scales, in the superwind model, the stellar winds are triggered by faster fusion reactions at the end of the star’s lifespan. The outer layers of the star will dry out over the decades. This creates a layer of cold gas around the star that causes the star to appear in size. Predict the last period less than one year. where more than one tenth of the moon can escape This will cause the star to dim 100 times during the last few months of its life.
Betelgeuse unmasked 2019 dark clouds as seen by this artist ʋiew Credits: NASA, ESA and E. Wheatley (STScI) for this study. The team studied supernoʋae of all red giants whose stars were beyond the stars before the explosion. Most supernoes only have an oszer after the explosion. Thus, between 1999 and 2017, there were only ten cases of good pre-supernocer phenomena. But in all those cases The star’s brightness remained relatively consistent in the years leading up to the supernova. This negates the superwind model and shows that the red supergiant should dim dramatically before it explodes. In the case of Betelguese, we saw the star as it spewed out a cloud of gas, not at the leʋel, indicating that There was a big explosion.
Unfortunately, we don’t have enough red giants to rapidly fade red giants. This may change in the future as the sky appears online in the long term. And who knows how well educated Betelgeuse is? Our red giant neighbor, or possibly the first star to give us a red supernova alarm.