Monday, August 3, 2009

Betelgeuse Pregnant?



Science Daily: Sharpest Views Of Star Betelgeuse Reveal How Supergiant Stars Lose Mass.

the sharpest ever views of the supergiant star Betelgeuse. They show that the star has a vast plume of gas almost as large as our Solar System and a gigantic bubble boiling on its surface. These discoveries provide important clues to help explain how these mammoths shed material at such a tremendous rate.

11 comments:

Jeffery Keown said...

At first I wasn't sure why you posted this. Then it hit me... you are intimating that Betelgeuse is about to eject a star or some kind of proto-solar system.

According to the standard model, that is what's happening... sort of. The gas in that plume will slow down, cool off and perhaps one day, condense into a star system under the influence of shockwaves from nearby stars or under its own gravity.

OilIsMastery said...

Perhaps Betelgeuse is giving birth to a giant gaseous protoplanet.

Jeffery Keown said...

Before you go passing out cigars, observation has shown that gas giants form far from their parent star and migrate inward, possibly dying cometary death or plunging into the star. Sometimes, they stabilize in the outer orbits and promote the developement of smaller worlds closer in toward the star.

A giant star has been shown to have planets, iota Draconis, for one. The orbit of the gas giant is rather elliptical... it's unlikely the system ever had life-bearing worlds.

Fungus the Photo! said...

Under the EU model, Stars that split are under electrical tension: they have attracted too much charge and can no longer discharge at a sustainable rate to their surroundings. As a result they are all blue stars? Betelgeuse is a red giant. There may be other reasons why there might be a cast off of a star or planet. A star is a planet that discharges in arc mode?
Anthony Peratt has suggested that there are galactic pulses at regular intervals and varying enormity. If there is a trough then dust debris etc invade the solar sytems affected and provoke solar eruptions, much as has been observed when comets crash into the sun or lerely pass too close, there is a solar eruption. As a result the planets in the system get a roasting.
But Betelgeuse is too far from 300 to 900LY given the difficulty in measuring distances, to be any threat to us but the magnitude of the decrease in size 15% in 15 years, suggests somthing exciting is happening. Wal Thornhill suggests that it is maturing in some way, too technical for my brain to recall.
There have been no observations of the formation of a solar system, I believe. It would settle many issues when it happens! Jeffery, can you cite the observation concerning gas giants?

Jeffery Keown said...

There have been no observations of the formation of a solar system, I believe.

You believe incorrectly.

Google Bok Globules and Herbig-Haro Objects. Try looking up T Tauri Stars or the phrase protoplanetary disk.


Blatant copy and past follows:

On January 8, 2007, astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope announced their collection of evidence indicating that gas-giant planets either form within the first 10 million years of a Sol-type star's life, or not at all. They conclude that gas giant formation occurs relatively quickly after a star is born, as the lifespan for stars like the Sun with a spectral type around G2 is about 10 billion years. This hypothesis is based on a search for traces of gas around 15 very young Sun-like stars, most with ages ranging from 3 million to 30 million years, where all appear to have less than 10 percent of Jupiter's mass in gas remaining around them. The astronomers also suspect that orbital drag from abundant gas around a star may also be important for nudging rocky inner ("terrestrial") planets like Earth into relatively circular orbits as they form. Using Spitzer's Infrared Spectrometer, the astronomers searched for relatively warm gas in the inner regions of these star systems, in a zone comparable to the region between Earth and Jupiter in the Solar System. They also used ground-based radio telescopes to search for cooler gas in the outer regions of those systems, a zone comparable to the region around Saturn and beyond (Spitzer news release; and Meyer et al, 2006). Their observations were made as part of a Spitzer Legacy Science Program dealing with the Formation and Evolution of Planetary Systems (FEPS).
According to computer simulations inspired by the finding of "hot" Jupiter-class planets found in inner orbits around nearby stars, the Solar System's own Jupiter may have formed 10 percent farther from the Sun than it is now, and then spiralled in by about 0.45 AUs (70 million kilometers or 44 million miles) over at least 100,000 years as it lost angular momentum to drag within the thick dust disk that surrounds young stars. Supporting evidence of this in-migration comes from an unusual group of 700 or so rocky bodies known as the Hilda asteroids, which orbit the Sun three times for every two made by Jupiter, and of which the vast majority have slightly elongated elliptical orbits, whereas many other asteroids have near-circular orbits. Computer simulations (led by Fred Franklin's team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) indicate that Jupiter's early in-migration would have ejected any proto-Hilda asteroids with circular orbits from the Solar System and would have further elongated the orbits of those that remained (Franklin et al, 2004). Luckily, Sol's dust disk was probably thin compared with those stars that dragged their outer gas giants into inner orbits closer than Mercury or into the stars themselves, perturbing the orbits of any developing, inner terrestrial planets. Indeed, astronomer Phil Armitage speculates that the in-migration of Jupiter could also have disturbed the proto-planetary bodies of the inner Solar System so that they collided more frequently, to spur the formation and growth of Earth itself. (More discussion is available on planetary migration models from Phillip K. Armitage and W.K.M. Rice, 2005 and Matsumura et al, 2006.)

Anonymous said...

Possibly what happened at the Origins of OUR Solar System. Is that a possibility?

Jeffery Keown said...

That something about our formation is unique? Sure. I think every star system undergoes slightly different processes. But they are composed of the same elements, exposed to gravity an electromagnetism, all three of which vary in their starting conditons.

Of the extrasolar planetary systems inferred and photographed, they differ from us, but the process seems to be the same.

Fungus the Photo! said...

Jeffery
You said there were observations. These are not observations of the formation of a solar system. These are theories masquerading as conclusions. Show me the pictures Jeffery!

Fungus the Photo! said...

Raptor
Is that a possibility?
Anything is possible Raptor, but we like to look at what is there and to deduce what happened. The deductions of conventional theorists are based on ruling out certain things such as the electro magnetic forces in the Universe. Our deductions are also based on what people who witnessed certain events say that they saw. They are all dead now so we must go on what they wrote or told their descendants.

Jeffery Keown said...

The deductions of conventional theorists are based on ruling out certain things such as the electro magnetic forces in the Universe.

Hardly. There is a paper on the role of electromagnetic forces in the formation of accretion disks.. I just can't find it right now. I'll link to it when I dig it up.

http://www.universetoday.com/category/extrasolar-planets/

Jeffery Keown said...

These are theories masquerading as conclusions.

I think you are mis-using the word conclusion, or do not understand the meaning of "theory." This is a fairly common problem.

Theory means "Best-fit to the observations." There are no conclusions... only sets of facts and theories to explain them.

I still want to find two articles for you, one that shows actual gas giant formation, the other discusses EM's role in planet formation.