Credit: ESO/W. Dent et al.

Today’s Picture of the Week, taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), reveals one of the most detailed views yet of the surface of Betelgeuse — the famous orange star in the constellation of Orion, 600 light-years away. Unlike our own Sun, which is relatively smooth and spherical, Betelgeuse is a red supergiant almost 800 times larger, with a highly uneven, lumpy surface. Betelgeuse’s peaks and troughs originate from the motion of giant bubbles of hot gas rising from deep within the star to its surface. The team behind these observations suggest that this large-scale movement of gas leads to these ‘hotspots’ on the star’s surface. Surprisingly, however, the brightest hotspot seen in the new observations also appears in data recorded seven years earlier, much longer than the lifetimes predicted by current models. The persistent nature of these hotspots may be connected to the orbit of a close companion star recently suggested by observations with ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The team was motivated to study the star’s surface to see whether hotspots could be related to events such as the dramatic dimming of Betelgeuse in 2020. As a star nearing the end of its life, there's another reason Betelgeuse draws astronomers. “Its eventual fate as a supernova makes it fascinating to know what it actually looks like now,” says lead author of the study Bill Dent, an astronomer at ESO. When Betelgeuse does eventually explode, it will be bright enough to see from Earth even in broad daylight. Link Research paper accepted in Astronomy & Astrophysics

Provider: European Southern Observatory

Image Source: https://www.eso.org/public/images/potw2634a/

Curator: European Southern Observatory, Garching bei München, None, Germany

Image Use Policy: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License