The companion star "has an estimated mass of about 1.5 times that of the Sun and appears to be an A- or B-type main pre-sequence star, i.e. a hot, young, bluish-white star that has not yet begun to burn hydrogen in its core... The companion is located at a relatively close distance to Betelgeuse, about 4 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. This discovery is the first time a stellar companion has been detected orbiting so close to a red supergiant star. Even more surprising is that the companion orbits inside Betelgeuse's outer atmosphere."
pixl97 14 hours ago [-]
Also
>This discovery provides a clearer picture of this red supergiant’s life and future death. Betelgeuse and its companion star were likely born at the same time. However, the companion star will have a shortened lifespan as strong tidal forces will cause it to spiral into Betelgeuse and meet its demise, which scientists estimate will occur within the next 10,000 years.
It's unfortunate our flesh lasts but a blink of cosmic time. That would be something to witness.
colechristensen 12 hours ago [-]
>It's unfortunate our flesh lasts but a blink of cosmic time. That would be something to witness.
My preferred solution to the Fermi paradox is that hundred million year long lifespans become trivial relatively soon at which point sublight speed galactic travel becomes no big deal and the differing time scale means that not being contacted by an alien intelligence simply hasn't happened yet, have you tried to establish communication with an ant hill in the last 10 seconds? Everybody else in the galaxy who could talk to us lives so long that they just haven't tried to say hello in the last 10,000 years because they were out to lunch.
Wow, so it's currently shining purely from gravitational energy release, not nuclear reactions. I hadn't realized that it was possible or that we'd be able to see something of the sort.
Sharlin 12 hours ago [-]
This was how physicists hypothesized the sun and other stars work in the late 19th and early 20th century, before the discovery of nuclear fusion. It presented a conundrum because calculations showed that the sun could only sustain the observed rate of energy release for a few million years – whereas the contemporary geological evidence was indicating that the Earth must be billions of years old.
The detection appears to be statistically very marginal, 1.5sigma, and the image contains a very similar bright spot on the opposite side of the star (which, for some reason, does not warrant a detection claim).
ac794 11 hours ago [-]
The 'ghost' on the other side is an artifact of the speckle imaging technique.
dylan604 15 hours ago [-]
At least they got to see it before Betelgeuse went supernovae. Do we have examples of the results of the companion star when the main star lets go?
bongoman42 13 hours ago [-]
For all we know, it might have gone supernova in the last few hundred years and we've yet to receive the light from it.
NooneAtAll3 18 minutes ago [-]
in relativistic terms, anything that we don't observe and hasn't observed us is happening at the same time as we are
so there's no point
dylan604 11 hours ago [-]
Betelgeuse is approximately 650 to 700 light-years away from Earth, so if you consider a few 300 then that means we have at least ~350 years to continue studying it.
dontlikeyoueith 14 hours ago [-]
Wouldn't all Type Ia supernova be examples of at least one possible end state of such an event?
The larger star explodes first in a Type II supernova, becomes a Type Ia.
dylan604 14 hours ago [-]
You're asking a question in response to a question. Your Type Ia link suggests this is not what is happening with Betelgeuse though. Its companion star is not a white dwarf. Betelgeuse itself is the start expected to go boom. So what happens to its companion? The anim you linked to shows that the white dwarf's explosion didn't destroy its larger star companion, but Betelgeuse is the opposite with the larger star going boom.
dontlikeyoueith 9 hours ago [-]
You're misunderstanding.
I'm not saying Betelgeuse would be a type Ia. Betelgeuse will be a Type II supernova.
I'm wondering whether Type II supernovae with smaller partners later become Type Ia once the larger partner explodes and becomes a white dwarf. The former smaller partner then becomes the relatively larger partner that loses mass to the remnant.
_spduchamp 7 hours ago [-]
The sequel wasn't as good.
pavel_lishin 15 hours ago [-]
Could this explain why Betelgeuse's brightness seems to vary so much?
edit: apparently, yep, that's why.
arnavpraneet 15 hours ago [-]
Could you provide any links as to this? Was not able to find anything
And from the original NOIRLab link: “This discovery answers the longstanding mystery of the star’s varying brightness”.
jimmytucson 5 hours ago [-]
The system’s brightness decreases when the companion star swings around behind Betelgeuse. It also dips when Betelgeuse goes behind the companion star but much less so because Betelgeuse is so much larger.
anjel 13 hours ago [-]
dumb question: If a pre-sequence star is assimilated into a larger EOL star, does all the newly assimilated fuel delay or accellerate the larger star's demise?
bonzini 13 hours ago [-]
It may prolong life by a few million years. A red supergiant's outer layers still have a few solar masses worth of hydrogen, and the extra material would delay the collapse of the star onto its core.
On the other hand, if the merger happens after the star has started burning carbon, it would have no effect. The explosions and collapses occurring in a supergiant are driven by successive phases of nuclear fusion in the core (collapse when one kind of fuel is exhausted, explosion as the previous fusion products become fusion ingredients), and they happen on a very short timescale (starting at thousands of years and ending at days before the star goes supernova). The presence of lighter elements billions of km away would not really have any impact on that.
SirLJ 5 hours ago [-]
Any comments from Ford Prefect about this?
dang 15 hours ago [-]
The submitted URL was https://noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2523/, but for some reason is frequently returning the Spanish version of the article. We replaced it with a link to a third-party article and will include the noirlab.edu link at the top.
>This discovery provides a clearer picture of this red supergiant’s life and future death. Betelgeuse and its companion star were likely born at the same time. However, the companion star will have a shortened lifespan as strong tidal forces will cause it to spiral into Betelgeuse and meet its demise, which scientists estimate will occur within the next 10,000 years.
It's unfortunate our flesh lasts but a blink of cosmic time. That would be something to witness.
My preferred solution to the Fermi paradox is that hundred million year long lifespans become trivial relatively soon at which point sublight speed galactic travel becomes no big deal and the differing time scale means that not being contacted by an alien intelligence simply hasn't happened yet, have you tried to establish communication with an ant hill in the last 10 seconds? Everybody else in the galaxy who could talk to us lives so long that they just haven't tried to say hello in the last 10,000 years because they were out to lunch.
The detection appears to be statistically very marginal, 1.5sigma, and the image contains a very similar bright spot on the opposite side of the star (which, for some reason, does not warrant a detection claim).
so there's no point
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/type-ia-supernova/
The larger star explodes first in a Type II supernova, becomes a Type Ia.
I'm not saying Betelgeuse would be a type Ia. Betelgeuse will be a Type II supernova.
I'm wondering whether Type II supernovae with smaller partners later become Type Ia once the larger partner explodes and becomes a white dwarf. The former smaller partner then becomes the relatively larger partner that loses mass to the remnant.
edit: apparently, yep, that's why.
And from the original NOIRLab link: “This discovery answers the longstanding mystery of the star’s varying brightness”.
On the other hand, if the merger happens after the star has started burning carbon, it would have no effect. The explosions and collapses occurring in a supergiant are driven by successive phases of nuclear fusion in the core (collapse when one kind of fuel is exhausted, explosion as the previous fusion products become fusion ingredients), and they happen on a very short timescale (starting at thousands of years and ending at days before the star goes supernova). The presence of lighter elements billions of km away would not really have any impact on that.
>Gemini North telescope in Hawai‘i reveals never-before-seen companion to Betelgeuse, solving millennia-old mystery