Monster Star Had Never-Seen-Before Titanic Eruption Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star, appears as a brilliant, ruby-red, twinkling spot of light in the upper right shoulder of the winter constellation Orion the Hunter. However, when viewed close up, astronomers know that it is a seething mons
of its visible surface in 2019. This has never before been seen on a star. Our petulant Sun routinely goes through mass ejections of its outer atmosphere, the corona. But those events are orders of magnitude weaker than what was seen on Betelgeuse.
Our Sun routinely blows off parts of its tenuous outer atmosphere, the corona, in an event known as a Coronal Mass Ejection . However, the Betelgeuse SME blasted off 400 billion times as much mass as a typical CME! Dupree is now pulling together all the puzzle pieces of the star’s petulant behavior before, after, and during the eruption into a coherent story of a never-before-seen titanic convulsion in an aging star.
Weighing roughly several times as much as our Moon, the fractured piece of photosphere sped off into space and cooled to form a dust cloud that blocked light from the star as seen by Earth observers. The dimming, which began in late 2019 and lasted for a few months, was easily noticeable even by backyard observers watching the star change brightness. One of the brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse is easily found in the right shoulder of the constellation Orion.