This Gargantuan Star Is Shedding 30 Earths a Year

Large stars that have come near their end start expanding dramatically to form mammoth red structures. As it does so, it is constantly losing large amounts of dust and gas as it expands and expels mass. Eventually, the hypergiant will explode in a violent supernova, collapsing on itself and destroying much of the surrounding cloud of stellar material. However, to date, scientists didn’t have any clear idea about the exact mechanism behind such exodus. The VY Canis Majoris is so huge that its outermost layers can reach up to Jupiter’s orbit from the Sunday.

They say observations using an instrument known as Sphere on the Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory may have provided an answer, by revealing a surrounding cloud of unexpectedly large dust grains 50 times larger than dust normally found between stars in interstellar space.

The stellar behemoth, a red hypergiant located 3,900 light-years from Earth, is quickly shedding mass, and now new observations are helping astronomers better understand how and why.

In the video, the star is shown to possess surprisingly large dust grains which can be pushed away physically using the force exerted by starlight. Those perfectly sized grains allow the star to expel a quantity of dust and gas from its surface each year equivalent to 30 times the mass of the Earth, ESO officials said in a statement.

Astronomer Peter Scicluna from the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan said that massive stars are known to have short lives. However, now, after checking these newly obtained views of VY Canis Majoris, they have come to know what exactly leads to the mass loss.

As per experts, giant stars shedlarge amounts of material every year.VY Canis Majoris expelsmaterial about 30 times the mass of our home planet.

Under normal circumstances, it is next to impossible to observe objects in close proximity to a star due to the high levels of interference thrown off by bodies such as VY Canis Majoris. Since they are large enough to be pushed away from the extreme radiation pressure, this is a telltale sign of the star’s rapid loss of mass.

“These are big enough to be pushed away by the star’s intense radiation pressure, which explains the star’s rapid mass loss”, explains Scicluna. If the star is huge enough, it will eventually implode after this stage and cause a powerful supernova blast. The size of the dust grains also means much of it is likely to survive the radiation produced by VY Canis Majoris’ inevitable dramatic demise as a supernova.

The demise of the gargantuan star will occur soon, in astronomical terms, in another few hundred thousand years.