Betelgeuse is one of my favorite objects to look at , partly because of its stark red colour , and mostly because my imagination fills in the rest period . That bright reddened whizz — this shoulder of Orion — is a supergiant that ’s gobs of times more massive than our Sun , and ready to explode as a supernova any day now ( any day within the next few million class , that is ) .
But if you see at Betelgeuse with a really knock-down scope , like the European Space Agency ’s Herschel telescope , and you ’ll see something like this : The red supergiant Betelgeuse in all its glorification , smashing its furious solar winds into its environment .
In this picture , just give up from the European Space Agency , you could see the powerful solar winds creating a bow electrical shock around the star as it plough through the interstellar spiritualist at a speed of 30 km / s. Closer into the star there are asymmetrical structure , where the hotshot throw its textile in fits - and - starts into its surround , like convective bubbles willy-nilly popping to the top of a kitty of boiling H2O .
It ’s the fundamental interaction of this supergiant principal and its surroundings that stargazer have been investigating , an analysis that has now been published in a newspaper title “ The puzzling nature of the circumstellar envelope and bow seismic disturbance surrounding Betelgeuse as revealed by Herschel . ”
researcher from several European universities combined data from Herschel , the GALEX space observatory , WISE , and even radiocommunication wavelengths to study Betelgeuse and its environment . They studied the star , the bow shock , and the asymmetric clumps of material around it .
Over on the remaining - hand side of the photograph is a secret moth-eaten paries - like structure that Betelgeuse is heading directly towards . Because this cold wall does n’t slue , like the bow electrical shock around Betelgeuse , astronomers do n’t call up it was due to the star itself . According to the researchers :
The linear bar might be the edge of an interstellar swarm enlighten by Betelgeuse or a linear filament whose potential origin is linked to the Galactic magnetic domain . Since no curvature is present in the bar , we believe that the legal community is not directly linked to a previous blue supergiant wind .
Betelgeuse is , however , creditworthy for illuminating this structure , like a torch illuminating a nearby fog bank . And agree the uranologist ’s calculation , the wiz ’s bow shock will collide with that wall in a mere 5,000 year , with the principal itself following cause 12,500 years afterward .
This article originally appear atUniverse Today .
Image reference : Herschel / ESA .
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