Betelgeuse Shedding Mass Like There's No Tomorrow

"Big Fat Star Sheds Pounds Like Crazy"
Space.com (July 29, 2009)

"As a large star nears the end of its life it begins to shed mass at a tremendous rate.

"New observations of the supergiant star Betelgeuse may help scientists finally understand how this feat of weight loss is achieved.

"Views from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile reveal a vast plume of gas spewing off of Betelgeuse, the shoulder star in the Orion constellation. This behemoth star has about 20 times the mass of our sun, but is losing about one sun's worth of mass every 10,000 to 100,000 years...."

Which is about a million times faster than our sun sheds mass.

Astronomers are learning more about how much and where Betelgeuse is shedding mass, but the don't know how. The article describes, very briefly, two ideas on what mechanism(s) may be at work.

Overall, this is a pretty good overview of what's known about Betelgeuse, and what's being studied.

If you think you've read about Betelgeuse in this blog before, you're quite right. All three posts on June 10 this year were about the red supergiant, with a fourth post explaining why I went Betelgeuse-happy.

I'm rather interested in astronomy, and Betelgeuse will probably become a supernova sometime between now, and about ten thousands years from now. We're at a nice, safe distance: but still close enough to give astronomers a really good look at the event.

Posts about Betelgeuse:

• "Lemming Tracks: All Betelgeuse, All the Time"
  (June 10, 2009)
• "Betelgeuse is Shrinking: Earth at Grandstand Distance from Supernova?"
  (June 10, 2009)
• "Betelgeuse is Shrinking: Faster Now Than Before"
  (June 10, 2009)
• "Betelgeuse is Shrinking: Why? Good Question"
  (June 10, 2009)