Betelgeuse: 2000 years ago it was a different color

betelgeusea star red supergiant one step away from the end, it hasn’t always been this way. It was once a blue and white star of the type O that belonged to main sequenceand in which the fusion of hydrogen proceeded at a rapid pace.

At the end of this life stage, it has taken on a more golden color, up to the red point we see today. Go see the observations made in ancient timesBetelgeuse had a nuance yellow orange about 2000 years ago, when in a short time transitioned to the nuance reddish we are used to these days. A very short period.

However, this was not enough for scientists, so much so that an international group of researchers, led by the astronomer Ralph Neuhauser of the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany, has developed a new timeline for Betelgeuse.

After consuming almost all the hydrogen, Betelgeuse began to melthelium in atoms of carbon And oxygen, causing it to expand, making it gigantic in size. Exhausted, this material will become one too supernova and its core will collapse into a neutron star.

his disappearance doesn’t seem imminent, at least according to the human time scale, but it’s estimated to have turned into a red supergiant about 40,000 years ago. However, which seems to contradict the documents studied by the researchers.

In fact, Betelgeuse was described as yellow-orange about 2000 years ago while Bellatrix And Sirius they were seen as blue-white and the supergiant red Antares instead red. This indicates that at that time the color of Betelgeuse was a cross between Bellatrix / Sirio and Antares. In the sixteenth century, the observations of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahm report that the star was an even redder color, to the point that it is approaching the same color as Anteres today.

These observations throughout history have enabled researchers to build one time scale in the life of Betelgeuse. First of all, it was possible to determine that its mass is 14 times that of the sun and from this parameter it was possible to find out that the star is 14 million years old and that it could explode in one shot. supernova in about 1.5 million years.