The strange behavior of one of the brightest stars in the sky, which scientists say is showing an unusual change in brightness, going from bright to dim twice as fast as normal, offers science an unprecedented image of how the stars “die”..

Beltegiz, one pulsating red supergiant which, due to its size, can be seen with the naked eye, is a star located approximately 640 light-years from Earth, in the constellation of Orion. This means that it takes 641 years for light to reach Earth, so if you happen to see a star at night, you will see it as it was almost 6.5 centuries ago.

It is about 10 million years old, it is much younger than our Sun (5 billion years), but, despite its … young age, it has a lot greater mass and therefore shorter life than the Sunand scientists believe that over the next millennia it will explode as supernova.

What characterizes a red giant is brightness fluctuations in 400-day cycles.

However, between late 2019 and early 2020, the star underwent what astrophysicists have called “great blackout” as a cloud of dust obscured the red giant.

Now, according to astrophysicist Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 150% brighter than its normal brightness and the brightness to dimmer conversion cycle has been shortened to 200 days – Make the brightness switching effect twice as fast as before.

This change makes it so seventh brightest star in the night sky although it used to be in tenth place.

The life and death of a star

Beltegez is expected to erupt at some point next 10,000-100,000 years.

“One of the most exciting things about Beltegez is how we trackthe last stages of the evolution of large stars will unfold almost in real time for us that we have never been able to study so deeply in the past, ”says the doctor. Sarah Webb is an astrophysicist at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia.

By observing its behavior, scientists gain valuable information about the “red giants” before their supernova explosion. When they explode, of such force that the explosion is visible on Earth even during the day.

As science explains, at the end of their lives, stars turn into red dwarfs and begin they release energymaking them swell they become unstable and pulsate for hundreds or even thousands of days, what experts and romantics on Earth consider to be the “twinkle” of the stars.

There are records from ancient Egypt of what appears to be a supernova star with descriptions appearance of the “second sun”Webb notes.

The large loss of brightness of the Beltezh was caused by the release of a huge mass of gas and dustor what scientists call “a massive ejection of mass from an abnormally warm convective cloud.”

That mass was many times that of the moon, explains Webb. “If we were to suddenly lose one of our arms, it would change how forces flow through our bodies. Something similar happened to the unfortunate Beltegez. Throw away all that mass and now its core and stability are trying to come backshe notes.

IN a study in which Dupree and other scientists from Harvard and Berkeley collaborated California, concludes that they will pass five to ten years before Beltegez returns to its usual 400-day cycle.

“After the loss of luminosity, the light and radial velocity curves of the star differ markedly from the previous ones,” the authors note. “It’s something unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like it,” adds Webb.

They were australian aborigines who first discovered the brightness cycles of the Beltezh before Western astronomers, who until 1596 believed that the stars are “changeless and changeless”.

Source: Guardian