Would the eventual absorption by Betelgeuse of the companion star precipitate, delay or have no effect at all on Betelgeuse going supernova? (If Betelgeuse does not go nova before absorbing it’s companion)
Contraction. When a star (or any other body) contracts, it decreases its gravitational potential energy, and that energy has to go somewhere. It can be enough to power a star for millions of years.
Interesting. Thanks.
Gravitational contraction was once a leading candidate for what powered the Sun itself:
But it can only power a star for millions of years, not billions. And the Sun needs billions.
I was going to ask the same question.
Spitballing like mad here …
They’re estimating the companion has a mass very roughly 10% of the primary. So not negligible. This is a cantaloupe dropped in a bucket, not a grain of sand dropped in a bucket.
The companion is full of the fuel elements that the primary has already used up. If they could be quickly moved to near the center of the primary, there could be a sort of reverse evolution of the standard stellar element “burning” = transmutation steps. Makes me think of something akin to spraying liquid oxygen into an existing fire. Might get exciting.
OTOH, the companion is a ball of gas. Orbiting within the thin outer shells of the primary atmosphere already. So although there’s a lot of relative velocity, it’s tangential to any given shell of the primary, not perpendicular. So the process of spiralling in will be very slow and “colliding” isn’t really a good word for what’s likely going to happen.
There is a Roche radius somewhere in here, where the companion is going to get increasingly smeared out into a larger less dense cloud of the same gas it ever was.
I don’t think that Roche disintegration will be an issue. Given how diffuse Betelgeuse A is, B will probably survive intact past the point where it crosses A’s photosphere. And if it survives that point, it’ll probably keep on surviving, because as it spirals down from there, it’ll have less and less mass inside its orbit, as well. The only question would be whether Betelgeuse A still has a dense core (at least comparable to B’s density)-- I’m not sure about that.
The more we learn about Betelgeuse, it seems that the less we realize we know, all at the same time.
If Betelgeuse A does go supernova, it will cannibalize B.
You can substitute [darn near whatever] for “Betelgeuse” in that sentence and it still works. Science is like that. Each time we peel back an onion layer of ignorance, we find … a larger onion with more layers underneath.
Sure, there are a few areas where we’ve mostly drained the swamp of ignorance. But not many.
Or sometimes, another, smaller onion orbiting it.
Hanging from Orion’s belt . . .
This means Betelgeuse B is very young (a few million years at most), and that implies that Betelgeuse A is also very young. It must be going through its stellar cycle very quickly indeed.
The more massive the star, the faster it consumes its fuel. I believe the most massive O-type stars go through their lives in something like one or two million years, maybe less. Betelgeuse was either a late O or an early B star when it was main sequence, which is not the most massive.
Knowledge is fractal. John M. Ford, the sf writer said something like, “Every time we solve a mystery God says, ‘Oh, you got that one now? Here’s another mystery.’”
Not the most massive, but definitely on the high end. Big stars live fast, die young, and leave beautiful corpses.
Another two, at least.
The articles say that A and B likely formed around the same time, but that B hasn’t even started fusion yet, with its much smaller size. But for A, it would have a long lifetime ahead.
Based on it’s estimated mass of 1.5 solar masses, BetelBuddy would be an F-type star when it settled down to main sequencehood. That’d give it a lifespan of around 4 to 5 billion years. Of course, that all goes out the window when the big guy supernovas.
This describes exactly how I feel about diabetes and cancer research, and no, folks, Big Pharma isn’t hiding the cure from us because it’s more profitable to keep people sick.
Using new observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories, astronomers tracked the influence of a recently discovered companion star, Siwarha, on the gas around Betelgeuse. The research, from scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), reveals a trail of dense gas swirling through Betelgeuse’s vast, extended atmosphere, shedding light on why the giant star’s brightness and atmosphere have changed in strange and unusual ways…
The team detected Siwarha’s wake by carefully tracking changes in the star’s light over nearly eight years. These changes show the effects of the previously unconfirmed companion as it plows through the outer atmosphere of Betelgeuse. This discovery resolves one of the biggest mysteries about the giant star, helping scientists to explain how it behaves and evolves while opening new doors to understanding other massive stars nearing the end of their lives.
Preprint at:
However I came across this negative comment:
Astronomer here! This result is actually NOT as clear as the press release makes it out to be and in fact I’m surprised NASA is doing a press release saying it’s a direct detection when it’s very much not. Heck they don’t even link the paper- here it is.
Now, multiple teams have been searching with HST, Chandra, and a bunch of other telescopes to find the companion of Betelgeuse, and have been for a few years now. There are two major teams, one of which got non detections with Hubble that mean “if we didn’t detect it the companion had to be under 1.5x the mass of the sun.” The second team, Howell et al, used a ground based telescope called Gemini North and had a 2.5 sigma detection of a companion- short of the minimum gold standard in science of a 3 sigma detection used to determine if a signal is real. (This has to do with statistics if you’re not familiar with the terminology- the odds of how real a signal actually is.) the Howell et al team placed a limit of a 2 solar mass companion.
So to be clear- HST is NOT capable of directly detecting Betelgeuse’s companion star. This is VERY misleading in the press release…