NASA Says Restless Red Giant Star Betelgeuse Had an Unprecedented Explosion
Its famous dimming event from a few years ago turns out to be evidence of a recent explosion rather than an imminent supernova.
Massive red supergiant star Betelgeuse is at the end of its life span, at least on cosmic timescales, but the gargantuan fireball is going out kicking and screaming.
Astronomers used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories to determine that the senior star actually blew off part of its surface in 2019.
"We've never before seen a huge mass ejection of the surface of a star. We are left with something going on that we don't completely understand," Andrea Dupree, from the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement.
"It's a totally new phenomenon that we can observe directly and resolve surface details with Hubble. We're watching stellar evolution in real time." READ MORE...
