Betelgeuse in Podcasts
placeBetelgeuse is a red supergiant star in the Orion constellation, known for its potential to go supernova.
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Is Betelgeuse really spinning at 5km per second after having eaten its companion star, or will the new claim that this rotation speed is nothing more than an optical illusion be vindicated?
The good news is that better images of Betelgeuse already exist, taken by the same telescope but with longer exposure times.
This also means that astronomers are now chasing after one key objective, higher resolution studies of Betelgeuse that could more accurately tell the two scenarios apart.
This means that even if the astronomers at ALMA did nothing wrong in their analysis, they may have been fooled by Betelgeuse's boiling surface into thinking it's spinning way faster than it actually is.
When simulations of the surface of Betelgeuse are made to account for the limited resolution of observations, they predict that the bubbly patches of redshift and blueshift will be easily mistaken for a rotational gradient about 90% of the time.
But remember that Betelgeuse is so far away that the image captured by Alma is far from ideal, and it's more of a blur than an HD photograph.
If astronomers observed a smooth gradient of colours coming from Betelgeuse, shouldn't the patchwork explanation already be ruled out?
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