Red star Betelgeuse will take 1,00,000 years to finally perish, claims new study

Even though the giant red star Betelgeuse has been showing peculiar behaviour in the recent months with many experts believing that it is closer to its death. A recent study has revealed that it will take another 1,00,000 years for it to finally perish. A team of international scientists led by Meridith Joyce from the Australian National University (ANU) including Shing-Chi Leung, László Molnár, Michael Ireland, Chiaki Kobayashi, and Ken'ichi Nomoto published their findings in The Astrophysical Journal this month. The supergiant star is a part of the Orion constellation and intrigued the scientists’ interests to its conspicuous behaviour lately. 

In a statement to the Australian National University, Dr Joyce noted that normally Betelgeuse is one of the biggest stars in the sky but also said that her team observed two drops in its brightness of the star since late 2019. It was this peculiar behaviour that triggered that it could explode soon but Joyce’s team offers a different explanation. Joyce said, “It’s normally one of the brightest stars in the sky, but we’ve observed two drops in the brightness of Betelgeuse since late 2019...This prompted speculation it could be about to explode. But our study offers a different explanation.”

“We know the first dimming event involved a dust cloud. We found the second smaller event was likely due to the pulsations of the star,” it added.

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How did the researchers find the time it will explode?

The ANU statement also elaborated that the researchers were able to use hydrodynamic and seismic modelling to learn more about the physics driving these pulsations and get a more enhanced idea of what phase of its life Betelgeuse is presently in. As oper the co-author Dr Shing-Chi Leung from The University of Tokyo, the analysis “confirmed that pressure waves – essentially, sound waves—were the cause of Betelgeuse’s pulsation.” 

“It’s burning helium in its core at the moment, which means it’s nowhere near exploding,” Dr Joyce said. “We could be looking at around 100,000 years before an explosion happens.” Further, another co-author of the study,  Dr László Molnár from the Konkoly Observatory in Budapest said that the study also revealed the size of the Betelgeuse and even its distance from Earth.

“The actual physical size of Betelgeuse has been a bit of a mystery – earlier studies suggested it could be bigger than the orbit of Jupiter. Our results say Betelgeuse only extends out to two-thirds of that, with a radius 750 times the radius of the sun,” Dr Molnár said. “Once we had the physical size of the star, we were able to determine the distance from Earth. Our results show it’s a mere 530 light-years from us – 25 per cent closer than previous thought.” 

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