This Hubble Telescope image shows the red giant supergiant VY Canis Majoris in the constellation Canis Majoris erupting massive amounts of material to form a giant nebula that extends about a trillion miles.
Remember last year’s sudden dimming of the bright star Betelgeuse in Orion? For a while, astronomers thought it was about to explode as a supernova. Then research finally made it clear that it was the result of a sudden eruption of massive amounts of material that blocked the light it was sending to Earth.
Recently, NASA’s Hubble telescope discovered that the red giant supergiant VY Canis Majoris in Canis Majoris is undergoing a similar process: a sudden massive eruption of material about 100 times the size of Sensui IV.
The study, published Feb. 4 in The Astronomical Journal, writes that the observational data confirm that this is “the largest eruption of material in the last few hundred years.
Canis Major VY is 3,900 light-years away from Earth, with a mass about 30-40 times that of the Sun and a radius more than 1,000 times that of the Sun. VY is not only huge, but also 300,000 times more luminous than the Sun, making it one of the most luminous stars and therefore classified as an extra supergiant star.
VY Canis Major now behaves like an ‘enhanced’ version of Sensui IV, and these similar processes suggest that convective activity on the surface of the red giant causes such discrete ejection events,” NASA said in a public release. For example, we know that the Sun also frequently experiences flares and gas eruptions.”
“But Canis Major VY is 30 times more massive and 300,000 times brighter than the Sun, and the scale of such an eruption process is much more extreme. The total mass of gas ejected from Canis Major VY can be as much as 10 times that of Jupiter.”
Photographs from the Hubble Telescope show these ejected arcs of plasma gas clouds surrounding VY Canis Major to an extent several thousand times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Astronomers estimate that this is the result of eruptions over the past several hundred years.
Closer to Canis Major VY, however, there are knot-like structures that astronomers estimate to be the product of more recent eruptions, probably between the 19th and 20th centuries. During this period, the brightness of Canis Major VY declined to only one-sixth of its original size.
NASA says the brightness of Canis Major VY is now invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen with a telescope.
This phenomenon (a significant dimming of brightness) is probably more common for red giants than we know, and Canis Major VY is an extreme example,” said lead researcher Roberta Humphreys, an astrophysicist at the University of Minnesota. It has always puzzled us that red giants lose a lot of mass, and now it seems that may be the reason.”
Humphreys is not yet sure what will happen next to VY Canis Major, but what is certain is that “it is clearly very unstable” and that “the massive loss of mass will determine its ultimate fate, either as a supernova explosion or as a black hole.”
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