The mysterious fading of the Battle of Zeus was a big puzzle to astronomers throughout 2019 and 2020. It proved that the stars had a mixture of regular changes and material exposure, which formed dusty sand after cooling, which obscured the light of the infamous stars. Astronomers have now found a similar scene surrounding another star, VY Canis Majoris, but it is more dramatic than Betelgeuse. VY Canis Majoris is a red hypergiant star. It is larger, much larger, much more active than Battle Zeus, and about 300,000 times brighter than our Sun. It is so large that if it placed where the Sun is, it would pass beyond the orbit of Jupiter.
When Betelgeuse experienced his strange fading, it faded so much that it went beyond the top 20 brightest stars in the night sky. The situation with VY Canis Majoris is even worse. It was an unconscious but visible star until 200 years ago, but since then we can no longer see it with the naked eye. A new study published in The Astronomical Journal has found that the cause is also the release of large amounts of matter.
Lead author Dr Roberta Humphreys from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis said in a statement, “VY Canis is behaving a lot like Betelgeuse on major steroids.”
“We see something similar in the VY Canis Majors, but the massive material emits large amounts of material that matches its very deep fading, probably due to the dust that temporarily blocks light from them.” Previous works using Hubble caused an explosion from the star of the data 100 to 200 years ago. The new observations were able to look more closely at the more recent explosions in the stars and measure their size and speed.
The team was able to date these events in more detail to create a more accurate picture of what was going on around them. The explosion took the form of a large knot, like a solar replica, extending hundreds of billions of kilometers from the star. Some of these structures double the mass of Jupiter. “It’s amazing that they can do this. In both VY Canis Majoris and Betelgeuse, the source of these high-loss episodes was probably due to large surface-sized, large-sized cells, such as the Sun, “Humphreys said.
“It’s from scientists the idea that red supergiants are more likely to be seen, and VY Canis Majoris is a final example. It’s even the cause of the major damage that caused the original damage, which has always been a mystery to red supergiants.”
