One of the largest stars in the Milky Way , VY Canis Majoris , has been caught undergoing a dramatic exercising weight loss , an event that annunciate the beginning of the end for the whiz .
stargazer from the European Southern Observatory ( ESO ) have used theVery Large Telescopeto look at the area around VY Canis Majoris and discovered that every year it sheds a mass equivalent to 30 earth . They used theSPHEREinstrument , which has the primary finish of directly visualise planet , to get detailed selective information about the cloth turn out by the star .
VY Canis Majorisis a red hypergiant about 30 time the batch of the Sun . It has a wheel spoke over 1,400 times that of the Sun , and if it were at the center of the Solar System it would extend to the orbit of Jupiter . There iscontroversyon the exact size of this wiz : Red giant are variable , germinate systems , and our intellect of them is somewhat limited .
gargantuan wizard tend to lose a pregnant fraction of cloth in the soma of junk and gas . These clouds form anenvelopearound an maturate star until the unavoidable supernova explosion tears the nebula apart . Scientists have been curious on how these former star expel cloth so efficiently .
The explanation that has been put forwards is that the starlight push the dust out , in the same manner that the lead pushes a sail . This mechanism is call up radiation pressing and it is very washy . consanguineous to wind , only the larger grains of rubble get enough of a push to escape the star ’s gravity .
“ monolithic stars go curt life , ” said Peter Scicluna , lead author of thepaperto be published in the journalAstronomy & Astrophysics , in astatement . “ When they near their last days , they lose a batch of mass . In the past tense , we could only conjecture about how this happen . But now , with the new SPHERE data , we have find big grains of dust around this hypergiant . These are cock-a-hoop enough to be push away by the star ’s vivid radiation pressure , which explicate the star ’s rapid mass departure . ”
The dust boot out by star topology like VY Canis Majoris play a crucial role in the enrichment of the Milky Way . It will pass around within the interstellar medium , becoming part of the next generation of planets and stars .
