Latest Supergiant Stories

John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Supernovae are important astronomical objects. They tell us about how stars die and are used as measuring sticks to investigate distant galaxies. But there is still some uncertainty as to how the supernova process proceeds in some cases. It is believed that the most common progenitor of Type II supernova is the collapse of supergiant stars. In this phase of their evolution stars oscillate between red supergiant and more...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A new image released by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows multiple arcs around Betelgeuse, the nearest red supergiant star to Earth. Betelgeuse and its arc-shaped shields could be colliding with a dusty "wall" in the next 5,000 years, according to ESA. The red supergiant star sits at the constellation Orion the Hunter, and can easily be seen with the naked eye in the northern hemisphere winter night sky as an orange-red star to...

redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A team of Japanese researchers has discovered evidence that a yellow supergiant (YSG) was, in fact, the progenitor for a recently discovered supernova -- a discovery which they say raises serious questions regarding our understanding of the evolution of massive stars. Melina Bersten of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) and colleagues analyzed evidence and discovered that supernova...

Just like out of a good science fiction setting on some far-off planet, our own Earth could soon have a second sun, but only for a limited time. The cosmic phenomenon will occur when one of the brightest stars in our night sky suffers a cataclysmic event -- exploding into a supernova. The supergiant red star Betelgeuse in Orion's nebula is predicted to explode, with the impending supernova possibly even reaching Earth. According to a report released Saturday, the most spectacular light show...

A study released on Tuesday showed that a massive bright reddish star in the Orion constellation has mysteriously shrunk by over 15 percent in the last 15 years and astronomers have not yet determined the cause, AFP reported.The supergiant star Betelgeuse, which is among the eight brightest stars in our sky, is so large that it would reach to Jupiter's orbit in our solar system. But the star has shrunk at a radius of about five astronomical units in size since 1993 by a distance equivalent to...

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has identified a star that was one million times brighter than the sun before it exploded as a supernova in 2005. According to current theories of stellar evolution, the star should not have self-destructed so early in its life. "This might mean that we are fundamentally wrong about the evolution of massive stars, and that theories need revising," says Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel.The doomed star, which is...

Where do supernovae come from? Astronomers have long believed they were exploding stars, but by analyzing a series of images, researchers from the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen and from Queens University, Belfast have proven that two dying red supergiant stars produced supernovae. The results are published in the prestigious scientific journal, Science.A star is a large ball of hot gas and in its incredibly hot interior hydrogen atoms combine to...

Almost two months ago my newborn son began his life just as stars go through a life cycle of their own. Stars are formed from within a nebula, a cloud of gas and dust. Over time, hydrogen gas is pulled together by gravity and begins to spin faster and faster until the gas heats up to spark nuclear fusion in the core, and a new star is formed. In the first stages of life, a star fuses hydrogen gas into helium. Ninety percent of stars are in this main sequence stage. The sun, about 4.5...

ESA's orbiting gamma-ray observatory, Integral has revealed a new population of exotic and dusty binary stars which might represent a brief evolutionary period in a binary star's life. The findings bring to light a gap in our knowledge of the formation and evolution of such binary star systems. Since 2002, when Integral was launched, the observatory has been surveying the galaxy, looking for sources of the most powerful X-rays and gamma rays. Fifteen of its new discoveries appeared to be...

Talk about a diet! By resolving, for the first time, features of an individual star in a neighboring galaxy, ESO's VLT has allowed astronomers to determine that it weighs almost half of what was previously thought, thereby solving the mystery of its existence. The behemoth star is found to be surrounded by a massive and thick torus of gas and dust, and is most likely experiencing unstable, violent mass loss. WOH G64 is a red supergiant star almost 2 000 times as large as our Sun and is...