Scientists have got their hands on one of the most detailed images of a dying star, that too of probably the largest one in our galaxy -- VY Canis Majoris, as per a report by The Independent.
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To the unaware, VY Canis Majoris is a red hypergiant that can stretch almost 10,000 times the distance between our planet and the sun in diameter. However, not much is known about the death of such red hypergiants.
Scientists believe that instead of blowing up into a big red sphere like most of this category, hypergiants are known to grow into irregular arcs and protrusions in a series of phases, releasing considerable amounts of mass.?
However, recently, researchers from the University of Arizona managed to trace these protrusions, resulting in the capturing of the clearest image of a hypergiant star till date.?
This was done thanks to the Atacama Large Millimeter Array radio telescope in Chile, where astronomers traced specific molecules in the matter ejected from the gargantuan star.?
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Then they mapped these traces to the images of the star previously taken by the Hubble Space Telescope to create maps of sulfur oxide, silicon oxide, phosphorus oxide and sodium chloride in the material that the star released.?
The image was first revealed on June 13th, at the 240th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Pasadena, California.?
What makes this discovery even more special is that hypergiants in the galaxy are already rare and we don’t have much knowledge about the second brightest stars in the constellation Orion, Betelgeuse. And VY Canis Majoris, situated around 3,000 light years away from our planet in the Southern constellation Canis Major, however, is the largest of them all.
University of Arizona professor of chemistry Lucy Ziurys explained, “With these observations, we can now put these on maps in the sky. Until now, only small portions of this enormous structure had been studied, but you can’t understand the mass loss and how these big stars die unless you look at the entire region. That’s why we wanted to create a complete image."
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