MEXICO: Astronomers have discovered that the hypergiant star VY Canis Majoris is shedding 30 Earthloads of dust a year in a massive weight loss programme before it goes supernova.
The supersized red star needs to lose huge amounts of its mass as it begins to die, eventually ending in an explosive supernova. To do this, it’s shedding dust and gas at an enormous rate and in sizes much larger than what’s normally found in space.
Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, a team of astronomers took the most detailed pictures yet of VY Canis Majoris, one of the largest known stars in the Milky Way.
The telescope’s new adaptive optics system on its SPHERE instrument allowed the researchers to see deeper into the cloud of gas and dust around the star and pick out how the light was polarised by this cloud, allowing them to figure out how large the dust particles are.
Each of the grains of dust is 0.5 micrometres across, which seems very small, but is 50 times larger than the dust that’s scattered around in space.
“Massive stars live short lives,” said lead author of the paper Peter Scicluna of the Academia Sinica Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics in Taiwan, in a statement.
