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Table · dataset · 2021

Betelgeuse during its Great Dimming

Listed in IVOA Registry (Virtual Observatory)

Red supergiants represent the most common final stage of the evolution of stars with initial masses between 8 and 30-35 times the mass of the Sun.

Description

During this phase of lifetime ~10^5 yrs, they experience substantial mass loss of unknown mechanism (Arroyo-Torres et al., 2015A&A...575A..50A). This mass loss can affect their evolutionary path, collapse, future supernova light curve, and ultimate fate as a neutron star or a black hole.

From November 2019 to March 2020, the second closest red supergiant (RSG, 222^+48^_-34_pc) Betelgeuse experienced a historic dimming of its visible brightness, witnessed worldwide. Usually between 0.1 and 1.0mag, it went down to 1.614+/-0.008mag around 7-13 February 2020. Here we report high angular resolution observations showing that the southern hemisphere of the star was ten times darker than usual in the visible.

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Observations and modeling support the scenario of a dust clump recently formed in the vicinity of the star due to a local temperature decrease in a cool patch appearing on the photosphere. The directly imaged brightness variations of Betelgeuse evolved on a timescale of weeks. This event suggests that an inhomogeneous component of red supergiant mass loss is linked to a very contrasted and rapidly changing photosphere.

Links

Topics

Provenance · 1 source records, 7 field assertions
SourceKeyLast seenRaw
IVOA Registry (Virtual Observatory)ivo://cds.vizier/j/other/nat/594.36512 d agoJSON v1
FieldAssertionExtractorEvidence
access_levelsource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0
concepts[field].local:field:astronomymapping · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0
descriptionsource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0rr.resource.res_description
license_textsource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0
publication_datesource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0
titlesource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0rr.resource.res_title
updated_datesource · IVOA Registryconnector:ivoa_registry@1.0.0