A team of astronomers report that the massive star Betelgeuse’s years-long dimming and brightening pattern (don’t worry – this is only the second time we’ve said this!) may be due to a much smaller star orbiting the red Caused by the movement of supergiant stars.
This companion star, if it existed, would be about the same mass as the Sun and could explain Betelgeuse’s long secondary period (LSP)—a 2,170-day (6-year) period during which the supergiant dims and brighten. You see, Betelgeuse is not synchronous with itself—its fundamental mode (or FM, which is the main way the star pulsates, or vibrates) is only 420 days long, much faster than its other, slower pulsating modes. A recent research team suggested that the second, smaller star in the Betelgeuse binary system may be responsible for this discordant pattern. The research is hosted on the preprint server arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed.
“The companion star will cause the two stars to move around their common center of mass, thus explaining the change in velocity; it will have an effect on the dust around Betelgeuse, thus explaining the change in brightness. “This absolutely changes our view of Betelgeuse. Opinion: It’s hard to comprehend at first that a star so well-studied could have a companion that hasn’t been discovered yet! ”
Betelgeuse is a 10-million-year-old star (a far cry from the Sun’s 5 billion-year age) located about 642 light-years from Earth and particularly bright in the night sky. Betelgeuse’s mass is 15 to 20 times the mass of the Sun, depending on who you ask. But one fact is indisputable: The giant star is operating on borrowed time and will eventually explode into a roaring supernova — an event that marks the end of a star’s life, save for the neutron star or black hole that usually remains behind.
You see, Betelgeuse’s fuel burns much faster than the golden clump of gas we need to survive (our sun is expected to die in about 5 billion years). When Betelgeuse runs out of fuel, it will expel itself outward, and what’s left of the star will collapse into an ultra-dense neutron star or a black hole, depending on how much material wasn’t sucked into it.
“If Alpha Ori B, which our team has given the pet name ‘BetelBuddy,’ is found, it will definitely confirm [long secondary period] is a 2100-day period, and a 420-day period is [fundamental mode]which puts Betelgeuse firmly in its core helium-burning phase,” study co-author Meredith Joyce, an astronomer at the University of Wyoming, said in an email to Gizmodo. “If Betelgeuse is in the core helium burning stage, it is about 100,000 years away from going supernova.”
In recent years, Betelgeuse has started acting funny. From late 2019 to early 2020, the star’s brightness was only 40% of its normal brightness, an event known as the “Great Dimming.” Scientists later determined that this dimming was due to the star ejecting a chunk of surface material that then cooled into a cloud of dust, making the star invisible to observers on Earth.
Jared Goldberg, an astronomer at the Flatiron Institute and lead author of the study, told Gizmodo that some believe stars’ LSPs are caused by faint companion stars that drag dust behind them , eclipsing larger stars. Therefore, mopping dust is out of the question. But after considering other explanations, the team doubled down on the companion star hypothesis: Such sidecar stars (or “Betelbuddy” in the case of our related supergiants) could modulate the gravity of the dust, or shine it, rather than dragging it behind them .
“We have to remember that there have been some claims about the detection of alpha Ori B (BetelgeuseMiguel Montargès, an astronomer at the Sorbonne University and co-author of a 2021 paper published in Science, said: nature described the dust surrounding Betelgeuse in an email to Gizmodo. “Each one has been proven wrong.”
But this “for Betelgeuse Have a companion,” added Montags, who was not associated with the recent newspaper. “It is a massive star (more than 8 solar masses), and statistics tell us that such stars are rarely born without siblings.”
“We all want to find Betelgeusecompanion,” Montagis said, adding that the study “could have implications for our understanding of red supergiants.
Last year, a team of researchers hypothesized that Betelgeuse would go supernova sooner than previously estimated: in just decades, and possibly even centuries, rather than tens of thousands of years. But other astronomers counter that Betelgeuse is in a helium burning phase (as Joyce points out) rather than the core carbon burning phase that marks the end of the supergiant star.
“The companion star itself will not affect whether Betelgeuse explodes tomorrow or in 102024,” Goldberg added. “However, Discover Companions help us predict It will be better when Betelgeuse explodes.
But in the end it is very difficult to find such a “BetelBuddy”. That’s because Betelgeuse is “extremely bright,” Molnar said. “A smaller, Sun-sized star would be virtually undetectable next to it.”
Thankfully, “nearly undetectable” leaves more wiggle room than actually invisible dark matter. “One particularly exciting possibility for me is to try to use the same techniques we use to directly image faint planets around other stars to try to detect companion stars around really bright stars,” Goldberg said. Some of these systems Exoplanets are discovered when they pass in front of their host star. The planetary bodies themselves block the light from the stars seen by telescopes, proving their existence.
More measurements of the massive star’s brightness are available, but they will need to be carefully parsed to see a mysterious sun-sized companion in Betelgeuse’s brilliant light. Still, such a discovery means Betelgeuse isn’t burning as badly as some say.
Forgot to say Betelgeuse three times – that doesn’t make the star eventually explode. Plus, it doesn’t sound as good as “Betelgeuse, Betel…buddy!”
