For the very first time, astronomers have imaged in real time the dramatic end to a red supergiant's life, watching the massive star's rapid self-destruction and final death throes before it collapsed into a Type II supernova.
Astronomy
Jan 6, 2022
11
908
Red supergiants are a class of star that end their lives in supernova explosions. Their lifecycles are not fully understood, partly due to difficulties in measuring their temperatures. For the first time, astronomers have ...
Astronomy
Mar 1, 2021
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253
Late last year, news broke that the star Betelgeuse was fading significantly, ultimately dropping to around 40% of its usual brightness. The activity fueled popular speculation that the red supergiant would soon explode as ...
Astronomy
Mar 6, 2020
4
1648
Using ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), astronomers have captured the unprecedented dimming of Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star in the constellation of Orion. The stunning new images of the star's surface show not only the ...
Astronomy
Feb 14, 2020
11
9479
Betelgeuse keeps getting dimmer, and everyone is wondering what exactly that means. The star will go supernova at the end of its life, but that's not projected to happen for tens of thousands of years or so. So what's causing ...
Astronomy
Jan 23, 2020
9
2380
Stars are not motionless in the sky: their positions change continuously as they move through our Galaxy, the Milky Way. These motions, too slow to be appreciated with the naked eye over a human lifetime, can be captured ...
Astronomy
Jun 9, 2017
0
14
Astronomer J. Craig Wheeler of The University of Texas at Austin thinks that Betelgeuse, the bright red star marking the shoulder of Orion, the hunter, may have had a past that is more interesting than meets the eye. Working ...
Astronomy
Dec 19, 2016
8
2745
For almost half a century, scientists have subscribed to the theory that when a star comes to the end of its life-cycle, it will undergo a gravitational collapse. At this point, assuming enough mass is present, this collapse ...
Astronomy
Sep 16, 2016
0
46
Looking west after sunset on Friday September 26, the thin waxing crescent moon forms a triangle with Mercury and Spica, the brightest star in the constellation of Virgo. You can see how far Mercury has travelled since passing ...
Space Exploration
Sep 25, 2014
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0
In 1975, Kip Thorne (BS '62, and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus) and then-Caltech postdoctoral fellow Anna Żytkow sought the answer to an intriguing question: Would it be possible to have ...
Astronomy
Jun 30, 2014
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