14 DAY TRIAL // Betelgeuse is one of the most massive stars observed from the Earth, but scientists have lately been astounded by the fact that it seems to be losing some of its mass and brightness to an unexplained phenomenon. Scientists wielding the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT), in Chile, have recently announced that their studies show vast plumes of gas spewing from the giant star, which has about 20 times the mass of our Sun.
At this point, they mention, it's estimated that Betelgeuse loses about one solar mass every 10,000 to 100,000 years, Space reports. “Mostly every star goes through such a phase at the end of its life. We know the mass is going out, but we don't know how it is expelled from the star,” Pierre Kervella, who is an astrophysicist at the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, in France, says. The peculiar thing about the behemoth star's behavior is the fact that it seems to be losing its mass at a rate that is about one million times faster than the rate at which our own star is doing the same thing.
The recent observations also seem to indicate the fact that the star is not losing matter in a uniform manner. It may be, the researchers believe, that Betelgeuse's spin is causing large amounts of mass in its body to move towards the poles, where they are simply “sprayed” away from the formation, due to large forces acting on it. In another theory, it may be that convection processes within the star are carrying gas bubbles with such momentum toward the surface, that, when they reach it, the gas is simply catapulted away from the surface of the star.
“There is a coincidence between the polar axis of the star and the direction of the plume. But convection appears more probable currently, because there are some observations which show that there is gas motion on the surface of the star,” Kervella says. “Maybe [Betelgeuse] will explode in a few thousand years, but it could also be next year. We don't know exactly. It has probably lived 90 to 95 percent of its life.”
Most likely, the star will explode in a supernova within the next 10,000 years, the investigators believe. Its main hydrogen reserves have been entirely depleted, and it now functions solely on helium and other heavy elements, which cannot sustain it for long. After the red giant phase is finished, a neutron star could result from the ensuing supernova.