Betelgeuse began to dim in late 2019, decreasing in brightness by as much as 35 percent before brightening again in April 2020. We now have the primary culprit: Via arstechnica
, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast., Betelgeuse is one of the closest massive stars to Earth, about 700 light years away. It's an old star that has reached the stage where it glows a dull red and expands, with the hot core only having a tenuous gravitational grip on its outer layers. The star has something akin to a heartbeat, albeit an extremely slow and irregular one.
Telescopes pointed at the giant were able to determine that—rather than a tidy, uniform drop in luminance—Betelgeuse's dimming, giving the star an odd, squished shape when viewed from Earth. That raised lots of questions about what was going on with the giant, with some experts speculating that because of Betelgeuse's size and advanced age, the strange behavior was a sign of a supernova in the making.
, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who made those observations. She is also a co-author on the new paper.The findings last year showed that an outer layer of the star, called the photosphere, had begun unevenly accelerating outward right before Betelgeuse began to dim. At its peak, the photosphere was moving at around 7 kilometers per second, reversing the outward push as the dimming of the star became more dramatic.
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