Scientists calculate that mass equaling 30 Earths are shed by VY Canis Majoris every year with much of this debris formed by large particles of dust.
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Massive stars that are close to the end expand dramatically into enormous red giants, and the gargantuan red hypergiant VY Canis Majoris, located around 3,800 light-years from Earth, is one of the biggest.
Currently, VY Canis Majoris is 30 to 40 times more massive than the sun and 300,000 times as luminous, but its impressive size won’t last. Those big grains allow VY Canis Majoris to expel gas and dust in huge quantities every year; scientists at the ESO are saying that the mass of dust and gas expelled by the star each year is 30 times of the Earth’s mass.
The SPHERE instrument uses a mirror-distorting process called extreme extreme adaptive opticsto correct images in the visible-light spectrum, giving the instrument a closer look at the star’s surroundings without its extreme brightness distorting the picture. SPHERE clearly revealed how the brilliant light of VY Canis Majoris was lighting up clouds of material surrounding it.
Eventually, the hypergiant will explode in a massive supernova explosion, destroying much of the surrounding dust and flinging the rest into interstellar space along with heaver elements created in the supernova. Radiation pressure is the main suspect, the idea being that photons from the star hit the dust grains, propelling them out into space.
Scientists see the mechanism by which a red hypergiant star sheds mass and expands on the way to death in a massive cosmic explosion.
Peter Scicluna, a researcher from Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics and lead author of new research, said giant stars always have a short life.
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. “When they near their final days, they lose alot of mass. In the past, we could only theorise about how this happened”. These are big enough to be pushed away by the star’s intense radiation pressure, which explains the star’s rapid mass loss. If the star is huge enough, it will eventually implode after this stage and cause a powerful supernova blast. These surviving dust particles become a part of the interstellar medium around the star, allowing new generations of stars to utilize them and form planets.
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It is not expected that the ancient star will meet its end for hundreds of thousands of years (a relatively short period in the life of a red hypergiant), and the resultant radiation will pose no threat to life here on Earth.
