Dust Works the Same Way in Space

Have you ever turned on a light switch in your house and thought to yourself, this light bulb isn’t as bright as it was when I first got it. At first, you assume that the bulb is slowly starting to die, but then you realize that the bulb isn’t that old. So you then start to twist the light bulb and you see your fingers caked in a layer of dust. The bulb was covered in dust, which caused it to be dim. The same is applicable in space with space dust and stars. That’s right, space dust can cause stars to appear dimmer, and that phenomenon recently happened with Betelguese, one of the largest stars that are visible to the naked eye.

Betelguese Getting Dimmer

Betelguese was first officially observed in 1836 by Sir John Hershel, who was easily able to find the star because it was so bright and large, even though it is 720 light-years away. In fact, the star is 11 times the size of our sun and is 900 times more massive. However, the star was seen many times before and is even a part of the Orion constellation as the left shoulder of Orion. Betelgeuse is classified as a red supergiant of spectral type M1-2 and is considered to be a single isolated star and a runaway star. Another interesting thing about Betelguese is that it is a pulsating star. This means that the star's radius is constantly changing and the star has no real edge. These changes occur because Betelguese is constantly creating and ejecting matter. However, one of the most interesting things happened in 2019, when the brightness of Betelguese started to change.

Betelguese

In October 2019, Betelguese started to mysteriously dim. By February 2020, the star lost about two-thirds of its normal luminosity. Mysteriously, by April 2020, Betelguese returned back to its normal luminosity. This perplexed scientists greatly. At first, many researchers believed that Betelguese was starting to cool or that the star was starting to die in a violent supernova. However, new data shows that space dust may have played a bigger role than the previous hypothesis talked about.

Prior to this new dust cloud hypothesis, the team used multiple instruments at the ESA’s Very Large Telescope facility in Chile. Now, the team is using new data from the Hubble Space Telescope. From this data, they saw that before the dimming occurred, Betelgeuse started to eject huge clouds of gas. Additionally, Betelguese started to cool down, causing the gas to condense very quickly into space dust, causing Betelguese to appear dimmer. 

Betelgeuse in Orion Getting Dimmer

Despite this new data, some scientists are not buying this theory. Some scientists believe that Betelguese may be close to collapsing because this type of behavior has been seen in other red supergiants. However, newly developed technology which has just been employed may finally show us the answer.

Betelguese Ejecting Material

Sources:

“Betelgeuse.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 17 June 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#2019–20_fading. 

Wall, Mike. “Mystery Solved? Dust Cloud Caused Betelgeuse Star's Weird Dimming, Study Finds.” Space.com, Space, 17 June 2021, www.space.com/betelgeuse-star-weird-dimming-dust-cloud.