Betelgeuse is one of the most famed stars in the night sky , being the remaining shoulder of the evenly well - have intercourse Orion constellation . But it looks like this red-faced supergiant star may be hide out a few arcanum .
consort to a novel report published in theMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , Betelgeuse is spinning much faster than we expect , and the reason might be that it ate a Sun - like star earlier in its living .
“ It ’s spinning 150 multiplication faster than any plausible single star just rotate and doing its affair , ” run author J. Craig Wheeler from the University of Texas at Austin aver in astatement .
Betelgeuse is about 15 to 25 times the good deal of our Sun , but it is an astounding 1,000 times the size . It is just 10 million year old , compared to our Sun at 4.6 billion class , and as a scarlet supergiant it will inhabit a comparatively inadequate life before it explodes as a supernova any time in the next 10,000 year . At just 640 lightheaded - years aside , the explosion will beeasily visibleto the naked eye on Earth .
As object get bigger , they are expected to spin out slower . The classical analogy is how an ice skater brings their arms in to spin faster , and frailty versa . But that ’s not the case here . Our Sun spins at about 6,900 kilometers per minute ( 4,300 miles per 60 minutes ) , but the much larger Betelgeuse spins faster , at 54,000 km / h ( 34,000 miles per hour ) .
bicycler and his team ’s proposal to account for this is that 100,000 eld ago , when it first expanded into a crimson giant , Betelgeuse may have live with a rotate comrade just about the same mass as the Sun .
There is no verbatim evidence for this theory as yet . But Wheeler pronounce that there was a shell of affair sitting near Betelgeuse that was reproducible with the idea . If Betelgeuse did eat a whiz , it would have fire off matter at about 36,000 km / h ( 22,400 mph ) , which would be some in the billet this shell is in today .
This theory would report both for Betelgeuse ’s speedy rotation and this case nearby . Sir Mortimer Wheeler ’s team is planning to employ asteroseismology , looking at healthy waves touch the airfoil of the whiz , to see what ’s materialise inside it and perhaps find more evidence for this theme .
