![]() Like MacLeod, Montargès thinks that Betelgeuse still has many thousands of years of life ahead of it and is rather unconcerned by the recent unexpected brightening. "Then you have the next phase that lasts like 10,000 years, then thousands of years, and then it's a century, and the final one is only some days and hours just before the explosion." ![]() "The helium-burning phase is several hundred thousand years long," Miguel Montargès, a post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Space Studies and Instrumentation in Astrophysics at the Paris Observatory and Betelgeuse expert, told. While the hydrogen-burning phase of a star's life can last billions of years, each subsequent phase is shorter and shorter. Here it can be seen through the eyes of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile. The lumpy Betelgeuse is one of the largest known stars. And when that change happens, the center of the star collapses on itself kind of from the inside out, and then that leads to what we call the core-collapse supernova." "So all of a sudden, rather than a reaction which is releasing tremendous amounts of energy, the center of the star starts to absorb energy. "Adding helium nuclei to an iron atom actually extracts energy rather than gives off energy," said MacLeod. Eventually, the star's core fills with iron. With helium gone, the star will sustain itself by burning carbon and oxygen into neon and magnesium, then burning those into silicon. While a star's regular life ends when it runs out of hydrogen and begins to fuse helium in its core, its expanded life as a red giant lasts beyond the helium-burning stage, explained MacLeod. "That means it's still tens of thousands or maybe a hundred thousand years from exploding, if those models are correct." "Our best models indicate that Betelgeuse is in the stage when it's burning helium to carbon and oxygen in its core," Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical astrophysics at Harvard University and lead author of a recent study about Betelgeuse's Great Dimming, told. The astronomers that spoke to, however, are tempering the supernova expectations. Its 400-day brightness oscillation period has halved to 200 days and, on top of that, the star now appears to be going through the extra brightening that excites skywatchers. If Betelgeuse were to go boom it would be the nearest supernova explosion in more than 400 years and it would be so bright it would be visible even in daylight.Īlthough Betelgeuse has since recovered its usual brightness, the star has not been quite its old self since the Great Dimming. ![]() Betelgeuse's recent antics, the beginning of which date back to 2019, have led some to speculate that the moment of its spectacular death might be near. Astronomers believe the star is now fusing helium into carbon and oxygen, a phase in a star's life that lasts tens to hundreds of thousands of years and precedes the star's demise in a supernova explosion. Since early April, however, the star has climbed to the seventh spot and currently shines at over 140% its "usual" brightness, according to the Twitter account Betelgeuse Status, which tracks the star's behavior.īetelgeuse is a red giant, an enormous star that has burned up all the hydrogen fuel in its core and expanded hundreds of times beyond its original envelope. Some 650 light-years from Earth, Betelgeuse usually ranks as the tenth-brightest star in the night sky. Keep this up for a month, and you may lose 2 to 3 pounds just by cutting added sugars.The star in question is Betelgeuse, a huge red-tinged star that sits at the left shoulder of the unmissable constellation Orion. Another study suggests this can mean a 14% decrease in total calories, which may mean you consume 280 fewer calories when based on a 2,000-calorie day. It just comes down to excess calories-although the less-satiating nature of simple carbs may also play a role. The researchers point out that there's probably nothing special about the effect of added sugars on body weight. In two other studies lasting 10 weeks and 6 months, subjects who consumed between 87 and 105 grams more added sugar daily gained 6 pounds on average. (As long as those calories weren't replaced with others.) Participants dropped an average of almost 2 pounds without changing anything else about their eating habits. ![]() An analysis of dozens of trials and observational studies published in the British Medical Journal showed that reducing added sugar in the diet-by anywhere from 10 to 71 grams a day-decreased body weight. ![]() Eating the same foods, but without the added sugars normally in them, means your total caloric intake decreases. ![]()
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