Posted on 03/06/2021 7:02:17 PM PST by BenLurkin
[I]n this case we're talking about the star VY Canis Majoris (or VY CMa for short). This ridiculously bloated red hypergiant is about 4,000 light years away in the constellation of Canis Major... VY CMa is an immense star, well over 2 billion kilometers wide.
Observations of the star show that it is blasting out way too much infrared light for a star of its kind, which is a telltale sign that it's surrounded by dust. This is usually microscopic grains of rocky (silicate-laden) or carbonaceous (sooty) material around the star (so we call it circumstellar, which is just a cool word). It's warmed by the starlight and so it glows in the infrared, causing the observed excess.
Extremely high-resolution observations of VY CMa show this dust, and they also show it's pretty complex. There are knots, clumps, arcs, and diffuse clouds around the star. New observations using Hubble, though, allowed astronomers to measure the speed at which all this dust is moving — much of it was ejected at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour.
The beauty of this is that they then measured the distance from the star to these various clumps and used that in conjunction with the velocity to trace the clumps backwards in time, to see when they got ejected. What they found is interesting indeed… the ages of the various clumps and other features indicate they were blown off the star around 70, 120, 200, and 250 years ago.
Looking at historical observations of the star, these periods coincide with times of great brightness variability in the star, dimming and brightening by a large factor.
(Excerpt) Read more at syfy.com ...
The event should still be 3750-3930 years away from observation.
“Belching out vast clouds of dust”
Hey, I think I dated her once...
You and me both! ;-) Seriously though, as the other poster pointed out, the writing is sloppy.
Would Monsieur Giant care for a wafer-thin mint?
Is the rotation axis pointing this direction?
And why Betelgeuse? There are quite a number of stars out there that are bigger.
Allergies are kicking up with Spring almost here.
Carburetor is set a little bit ‘rich’. Better lean it out.
Read the article...
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