You don't like it when a star suddenly decides to go supernova, you just mind your own business. Scientists know what these stars look like before they die.
New simulations show that the progenitors of neutron stars dim in the last few months before they explode. There's a good chance that there's a supernova on the horizon if a massive star fades into total obscurity.
Some of the most interesting stars are those that have the mass of the Sun but are red. The beasts are running low on the fuel they need to support nuclear fusion in their core.
The inward pressure of gravity is provided by that fusion. Things become violent if the fusion is taken away. The stellar core collapses for most stars when the star kabooms.
The core of the red supergiants is between 1.1 and 2.3 times the mass of the Sun, which makes it an ultra dense neutron star.
A lot of mass is lost by the star before the show starts. On a theoretical level, we don't understand red supergiant mass loss.
The timescale on which the red supergiants shed a lot of gas and dust in the lead up to the supernova is not known.
Past research suggests that it could be over decades, or in less than a year.
A group of researchers used observational evidence and simulations to reconstruct how a dying red supergiant evolved.
The cloud of material around the star blocks the light from hitting the ground by a factor of 100 and near-IR light by a factor of 10.
The star is 100 times fainter in the visible part of the spectrum due to the dense material. You wouldn't be able to see it on the day before it explodes.
The researchers wanted to know how long the mass loss took. Around a year after the image was taken, a red supergiant star exploded. This is proof that mass loss occurs within a year.
We already knew that Betelgeuse was going to die. Betelgeuse is 1.5 million years away from a supernova, according to the latest estimates.
If we're still alive, we'll know what to look out for.
Davies says that they have only been able to get detailed observations after the event.
We can get ready to observe them real-time, to point the world's best telescopes at the first stars, and watch them get ripped apart in front of our eyes.
The research has been published in a journal.
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