NASA says Betelgeuse star recovering after massive explosion 'blew its top'

Astronomers are currently observing a supergiant star named Betelgeuse that blew part of it in 2019 and is now showing unusual behaviour. Observations from Hubble Space Telescope and several other observatories revealed that the explosion occurred in 2019 following which Betelguese lost a substantial part of its visible surface and is now producing a gigantic Surface Mass Ejection (SME).

The SME is similar to Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), the event in which our sun routinely blows off parts of its outer atmosphere called the corona. However, the major difference is that the explosion on Betelguese blasted off 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME. 

Betelguese recovering from explosion

Although the supergiant star is found to be recovering from the explosion, astronomers say that its interior is bouncing in the aftermath. Considered one of the biggest stars ever known, Betelguese is around 1,400 times larger than the sun. According to NASA, however, such explosions are clues to decoding how red stars lose mass late in their lives as their nuclear fusion furnaces burn out and they go supernova. 

"We've never before seen a huge mass ejection of the surface of a star. We are left with something going on that we don't completely understand", Andrea Dupree of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, said in an official statement. "It's a totally new phenomenon that we can observe directly and resolve surface details with Hubble. We're watching stellar evolution in real time".

Astronomers have concluded that the 2019 explosion bubbled from deep inside the star producing shocks and pulsations that blasted off the chunk of the photosphere (the visible upper layer). This left Betelguese with a large cool surface area under the dust cloud that was produced by the cooling piece of the photosphere. Interestingly, the fractured piece of photosphere weighed several times the mass of the Moon and later sped off into space, formed a dust cloud and blocked the view of the telescopes. 

While such massive explosions and the mass lost by the stars in the process affects their fate, scientists are convinced it is not necessarily the signal of an imminent explosion. As for Betelguese, it would also not blow up again any time soon.