Betelgeuse mysteriously shrinking

By Robert Sanders, Media Relations | 09 June 2009


Betelgeuse, a star so large its shape can be seen through the Hubble Space Telescope.




BERKELEY — The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has steadily shrunk over the past 15 years, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

Long-term monitoring by UC Berkeley's Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern California shows that Betelgeuse (bet' el juz), which is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.

Since Betelgeuse's radius is about five astronomical units, or five times the radius of Earth's orbit, that means the star's radius has shrunk by a distance equal to the orbit of Venus.

"To see this change is very striking," said Charles Townes, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics who won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the laser and the maser, a microwave laser. "We will be watching it carefully over the next few years to see if it will keep contracting or will go back up in size."

more:

http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2009/06/09_betelim.shtml

Of course, Faux "news" sez "Nearby Star May Be Getting Ready to Explode" !!!!!!

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525695,00.html

cosmic/celestial events go.

My friends raved about it. I watched the whole thing waiting for it to get funny.

Sylvia Sydney (afterlife counselor).

They might be seeing something that happened a long time ago.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse



(Emphasis mine)

Think Hale-Bopp, multiplied many, many times...

:P

the size of supergiants can change a lot over time, contracting into a Blue Supergiant and expanding back into a red one again.

with a neutron star at its center. The nebula will be visible to the naked eye. The last super nova visible to the naked eye left us the Crab Nebula:



M1: The Crab Nebula from Hubble

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, J. Hester, A. Loll (ASU); Acknowledgement: Davide De Martin (Skyfactory)

Explanation: This is the mess that is left when a star explodes. The Crab Nebula, the result of a supernova seen in 1054 AD, is filled with mysterious filaments. The filaments are not only tremendously complex, but appear to have less mass than expelled in the original supernova and a higher speed than expected from a free explosion. The above image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, is presented in three colors chosen for scientific interest. The Crab Nebula spans about 10 light-years. In the nebula's very center lies a pulsar: a neutron star as massive as the Sun but with only the size of a small town. The Crab Pulsar rotates about 30 times each second.

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080217.html

Cold water can have that effect...