Astronomers are always looking for things they have never seen before, and with all its endless expanses, space is the gift that will always give.
According to Space.com, a team of astronomers observed one of the largest stars in the Milky Way Galaxy rapidly shed mass as it deteriorates before dying in a giant supernova. VY Canis Majoris, a "red hypergiant," is about 3,800 light years from Earth and is turning into red giant.
The researchers published a study on their findings in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
"Massive stars live short lives," study lead author Peter Scicluna, of the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, said in a news release. "When they near their final days, they lose a lot of mass. In the past, we could only theorize about how this happened. But now, with the new SPHERE data, we have found large grains of dust around this hypergiant. These are big enough to be pushed away by the star's intense radiation pressure, which explains the star's rapid mass loss."
The researchers used the SPHERE instrument of the Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) for their research.
"The large grains of dust observed so close to the star mean that the cloud can effectively scatter the star's visible light and be pushed by the radiation pressure from the star," read the ESO release. "The size of the dust grains also means much of it is likely to survive the radiation produced by VY Canis Majoris' inevitable dramatic demise as a supernova. This dust then contributes to the surrounding interstellar medium, feeding future generations of stars and encouraging them to form planets."
