Like California City, envisioned as home to a Mars research station and Mars City basecamp by Vera Mulyani, The desert surrounding Dubai provides an ideal testing ground. Barren and dry as Mars itself, there’s plenty of room there for the Mohammed Bin Rashid Space Centre (MBRSC) to establish a project that covers 176,000 square meters. It’s called Mars Science City, and its current budget is estimated at $135 million.

The architects Bjarke Ingels Group have submitted plans for a prototype Mars Science City to be tested in the Emirati desert. To achieve this first stage, they analyzed the challenges that the hostile Martian environment presents to humans, and conceived solutions for overcoming them.

The first challenges are avoiding the powerful radiation that pierces Mar’s thin atmosphere, the low gravity, and creating an artificial temperature that permits human life. The normal Martian temperature is  -63°C (-81°F); a tad chilly for sustaining life. Given the scant air pressure due to the thin atmosphere and low gravity, fluids transform to gas quickly, such that an unprotected person’s blood would boil away.

Other challenges will doubtless arise to be dealt with, but the architect Bjarke Ingels Group has already proposed detailed plans for living on Mars.

In an interview with CNN, Jakob Lange, partner at Bjarke Ingels Group, gave a picture of how the artificial city would be made habitable. People would live inside of pressurised, oxygen-filled biodomes covered by transparent polyethylene. The oxygen would be made by passing electricity through ice stored underground.

Solar energy would power and heat the city, taking advantage of the thin atmosphere to maintain a comfortable warm temperature.

Lange explained, “Since there is very little atmosphere on Mars, the heat transfer will be very low, meaning that the air inside the domes will not cool down as fast as it would on Earth.”

Buildings would be constructed of red Martian soil and 3D-printed. Rooms 20 feet long would be built underground as insurance against radiation, dust storms, and meteor crashes. Light would filter in from water-filled skylights with living fish swimming inside them.

“In the future on Mars, you would have skylights in your underground cave that would be like aquariums,” said Lange.

Our great-grandchildren, can expect to see other fantastic forms of buildings on Mars, which has only one third of Earth’s gravity.

“… which means that you can suddenly make columns that are … slimmer and longer,” Lange said. “It creates almost like a completely new rule set that you have to follow when designing architecture in space.”

This brings to mind the covers of sci-fi magazines from the 1960s showing spacecraft hovering over tall, many-turreted buildings, and a huge pockmarked planet glimmering in the background.

Looking even longer into the future, it’s hoped that as the Martian population grows, biodome villages will be built and eventually join to become cities.

The earthly model for the Mars Science Center will be 3D-printed from desert sand and its domes will not be artificially filled with oxygen. But there will be water skylights and solar energy will power it, as projected for the building on Mars. It will contain rooms for a school, a museum, and office spaces, as per the Martian plans. Israelis show us a prototype of a 3D printed home they created for living on Mars.

Vera Mulyani in California is also building a Mars City.

Past testing grounds for space missions include Antarctica’s Concordia Station, California’s Mojave Desert, where NASA tested Mars rovers, and the Moroccan Sahara, where the European Space Agency created a Mars analog. But the MBRSC hopes that in the future, Mars Science City will be the foremost facility for testing conditions on Mars.

“This is going to be our platform where we can develop the science [and] the technology that will help us in our future missions to Mars,” said Adnan AlRais, Mars 2117 Program Manager at MBRSC. “We want to come up with a totally new facility that will help the international community.”

MBRSC hasn’t given final approval to a design for the Mars Science Centre, nor settled on an architect. They are developing a budget for the project and determining how much desert space it would need.

The MBRSC’s space program has been active since 2014. They have sent an astronaut into outer space (September of 2019) and launched a probe to Mars in July 2020. The probe is named Hope and is expected to return in February of this year, loaded with data on Martian conditions.

More plans are to send an Emirati crew member to the international analog mission in Russia that’s to test the effect of isolation and confinement on mental and physical health. The project will take place in November of this year, and will last eight months.

Scott Kelly spent 340 days in the International Space Station (ISS) while his brother, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, was on Earth the whole time. This methodology has allowed scientists a distinct approach to the effects that space traveling has on persons. The preliminary results were presented last week in the annual Investigator’s Workshop for NASA’s Human Research Program. Both Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko returned to Earth last March, after accomplishing the one-year long mission.

One of the primary objectives of the researchers was to observe the gene variation that both brothers could have experienced after one year of study. Scientist groups have proved in the past that 6 months in space could have adverse effects on a person’s health, as it can stretch the spine, shrink the muscles and alter the sleep cycle.

No previous investigation has focused on the implications that space travel has on the human body when a mission lasts more than 6 months. Researchers are looking forward to the results as the conclusion they could present will have repercussions on the plans regarding future deep-space missions.

“The preliminary results from the year-long ISS expedition and the associated Twin Study have not identified any show-stoppers for longer human spaceflight missions,” NASA Human Research Program chief scientist John Charles said in a statement. “Some of the results, such as the unexpected increase in telomere length in Scott Kelly, require additional analysis and correlation with the results of other investigators, and may prove to be an artifact or transient change.”

How different is life on Earth and in space?

There are as most as 10 different research teams analyzing all the information from both of the participants of the study, the Kelly brothers. Several teams are in charge of analyzing specific data like changes in the immune system, bone formation, and DNA alterations.

Regarding DNA analysis, researchers are trying to define if the dubbed “space-gene” activated during the time that Scott was in space. They sequenced the DNA and RNA from the twins’ white blood cells and discovered that there are hundreds of mutations that are unique to each brother. The team found that almost 200,000 RNA cells showed themselves differently in each twin.

The results of the study revealed that Scott’s mutations and chemical modifications in his DNA were less than when he returned to Earth. Mark’s measures also presented variations during the time of the study. The researchers established that this proved the human gene’s susceptibility when facing an environment change, in Earth or space.

All the findings are preliminary as there is no conclusive information that can explain why there were distinct gene mutations or a telomere enlargement in Scott’s case, during the study time lapse. An in-depth report is expected this year, as well as the summary of all the research teams working on the subject.

No no, we’re not about to recreate the Pink Floyd laser light show, in zero gravity, 350 km about the Earth, and traveling at 27,724 km per hour. Instead, the hemp cultures will be incubated on the ISS for 30 days, with BioServe Space Technologies monitoring the growth remotely at the University of Colorado.

The experimentation is being conducted to see what effects if any, microgravity and space radiation have on their natural gene expression and metabolic pathways.

“There is science to support the theory that plants in space experience mutations,” Front Range Co-Founder and CEO Dr. Jonathan Vaught noted in a statement. “This is an opportunity to see whether those mutations hold up once brought back to Earth and if there are new commercial applications.”

The results of the research could help growers and scientists identify new varieties or chemical expressions in the plants, and help further the understanding of how plants manage the stress of space travel, setting the stage for a new area of research for the companies, and the industry.

“This is one of the first times anyone is researching the effects of microgravity and spaceflight on hemp and coffee cell cultures.”

With rising temperatures across the planet due to climate change, many environments on Earth that once supported thriving crops, are now no longer able to do so. Learning how plants respond to stimuli and new conditions, such as that of zero gravity and space, with help with our understanding of future plant and crop viability.

The supply mission scheduled for March 2020 is the next one currently being planned for, with SpaceX’s most recent supply run taking place this past Sunday, hauling nearly three tons of cargo to the ISS.

Over the last two centuries, it has lost nearly 10% of its strength, leading some to speculate that a multi-century pole reversal has begun. What’s more, scientists have identified a large, localized region of weakness extending from Africa to South America, along with a second ‘center of minimum intensity’ southwest of Africa – both of which are allowing charged particles from the cosmos to penetrate lower altitudes of the atmosphere – throwing off satellites flying in low-Earth orbit, according to Sky.

Known as the South Atlantic Anomaly, the field strength in this area has rapidly shrunk over the past 50 years just as the area itself has grown and moved westward.

Over the past five years a second centre of minimum intensity has developed southwest of Africa, which researchers believe indicates the anomaly could split into two separate cells. –Sky

According to scientists from the Swarm Data Innovation and Science Cluster (DISC) at the European Space Agency (ESA), measurements from their ‘swarm satellite constellation’ have shed tremendous light on the second anomaly.

In fact, the anomaly had puzzled ESA researchers as their Swarm satellites would sometimes ‘black out‘ when flying through the affected region. Three years ago, they observed a link between the blackouts and Ionospheric thunderstorms.

“The new, eastern minimum of the South Atlantic Anomaly has appeared over the last decade and in recent years is developing vigorously,” said Dr. Jurgen Matzka of the German Research Center for Geosciences. “We are very lucky to have the Swarm satellites in orbit to investigate the development of the South Atlantic Anomaly. The challenge now is to understand the processes in Earth’s core driving these changes.”

If this is the beginning of a pole reversal – which happens roughly every quarter-million years, it would result in multiple north and south magnetic poles all around the globe during the multi-century phenomenon.

“Such events have occurred many times throughout the planet’s history,” said ESA, adding “we are long overdue by the average rate at which these reversals take place (roughly every 250,000 years)”

Not to worry, in theory, as the space agency says that the South Atlantic dip which they’re still learning about was “well within what is considered normal levels of fluctuations.”

For people on the surface the anomaly is unlikely to cause any alarm, but satellites and other spacecraft flying through the area are experiencing technical malfunctions.

Because the magnetic field is weaker in the region, charged particles from the cosmos can penetrate through to the altitudes that low-Earth orbiting satellites fly at.

“The mystery of the origin of the South Atlantic Anomaly has yet to be solved,” added ESA.

However, one thing is certain: magnetic field observations from Swarm are providing exciting new insights into the scarcely understood processes of Earth’s interior. – Sky

Scott and Mark Kelly were gathered and recruited by NASA to see what differences they would have if one of them spent a long time in space. Both twin brothers accepted and decided that Scott should be the one to make the space journey. He was sent to the International Space Station for a year, while Mark stayed on the ground.

NASA began this experiment to determine how DNA is affected after spending an extended period of time living in space. There’s actual knowledge about physical changes that humans can suffer while being up there, but nothing related to the changes genes go through after spending several months under the effects of a zero-gravity environment.

“Some of the most exciting things that we’ve seen from looking at gene expression in space is that we really see an explosion, like fireworks taking off, as soon as the human body gets into space,” says investigator Chris Mason. “With this study, we’ve seen thousands and thousands of genes change how they are turned on and turned off. This happens as soon as an astronaut gets into space.”

When Scott came back, the space agency’s scientists started right away the analysis to compare how his DNA changed, along with any other difference his body suffered due to the year — 340 days, specifically — spent in the ISS. Then, they compared the results to Mark’s body and DNA.

The experiment comparing both DNAs of identical brothers after one lived a year in space is a unique and rare opportunity for NASA. The agency can now know how humans change after all the stress suffered up there.

The conclusion was more than just a simple change in Scott’s height. Scientists informed that his DNA was strongly affected after all that time he spent in space. As the principal investigator on the NASA Twins study, and an associate professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, Christopher Mason, told Business Insider, scientists could “observe the entire human biological system responding to space flight.”

Basically, researchers have a lot to think about now.

The differences between Kelly twins after one year in space

People going to space for a short period usually came back with their spine stretched, muscles shrieked, and their sleep cycle changed. But the effects of long-term exposure were not wholly assessed before.

While in space, Scott’s methylation was much higher than his brother Mark’s. This might be because he was in an environment where it was barely gravity, so his body had to adjust to it radically.

Scott also sent information of his telomeres, which are the caps at the end of chromosomes. According to the scientists, these were longer while he was in space, but then they turned to normal after he returned to Earth.

Usually, old people present longer telomeres than younger folks. This makes Susan Bailey, a radiation biologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, believe that’s “the opposite” of what she thought before.

Maybe because of the brother’s different diets, both of them also presented different gut bacteria throughout the long study.

The scientists informed that they would keep making more research on the identical brothers’ DNA.

Source: NASA

Jane Greaves, an astronomer from Cardiff University and research team leader, said it should not be present on Venus due to the photochemical and geological impossibility of producing it there. This led them to conclude that microorganisms could be present on Venus.

Conditions on Mars and Venus

Most astronomers are confident that someday, life on other planets will be discovered. One of the first candidates, Mars, was found by scientists to be frozen and dead. It had a fragile atmosphere irradiated with UV.

Meanwhile, Venus has an atmosphere that is super-heated and dense, with sulfuric acid clouds hanging above carbon dioxide. Its surface was hot enough to melt lead.

Extremophilic Microbes

Recently, carbon-based microorganisms known as extremophiles were discovered on hostile Earth environments, such as highly acidic water, nuclear waste, and vents under the sea with colossal pressures and temperatures. They were found in space, on the bolted panels outside the ISS, living in a space vacuum for years.

It seems that life is not fragile after all, and if Earth microbes can live in such extreme environments, maybe there are similar microorganisms on other planets.

Planetary and satellite Candidates

Interplanetary probes showed that Jupiter has satellites that contain underground oceans.

Its satellite Titan also has organic chemicals in its atmosphere and possess lakes with methane and ethane hydrocarbons. Organic compounds are life’s building blocks.

Meanwhile, on Mars, ancient rivers and creeks were found, where water once freely flowed. Underground, it might still contain life.

Currently, we only know one place where life exists: on Earth. Whether life is rare in the universe or widespread and common, we still have to find out.

Promising Candidates

Despite the discovery of phosphine on Venus, Edinburgh University professor Charles Cockell doubts that there is life there due to its hostile environment. He says, though, that there are a lot of other places that show more promise.

Mars

The Red Planet was similar to Earth billions of years in the past, and life could have occurred during that time. Today, they may still linger under the ground.

The Perseverance robot rover is set to collect rocks in the coming years to be examined for fossils and life signs.

Jupiter’s Europa

Jupiter’s moon Europa is ice coated. Beneath it, a saltwater ocean has been discovered. Since life thrives in water, and Europa has a lot of it, it is a promising candidate, according to the University of Westminster astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell.

The US will send the Europa Clipper to probe Europa in 2030. A separate mission may look for biological signs of activity in the moon’s underground ocean.

Saturn’s Enceladus

Enceladus is a small satellite of Saturn with geysers venting organic matter and salt from its underground ocean. This will make it easy to collect samples because Enceladus gushes the water out to space.

Unfortunately, according to Cockell, decades will be needed to send a mission and bring back samples for study.

Titan

Titan, Jupiter’s satellite, has lakes of methane & ethane liquid hydrocarbons. It is freezing, but there is still a possibility that the hydrocarbons can evolve lifeforms, according to Dartnell.

Thus, if not on Venus, the search for life is quite promising for the other planets and moons in our solar system, and scientists continue to search.

The study, published in the journal Nature, says that the subsurface ocean under Sputnik Planitia region could be filled with ammonia, similar to what scientists have detected to one of Pluto’s moon, Charon, Phys.org reports.

“In fact, New Horizons has detected ammonia as a compound on Pluto’s big moon, Charon, and on one of Pluto’s small moons. So it’s almost certainly inside Pluto. What I think is down there in the ocean is rather noxious, very cold, salty and very ammonia-rich—almost a syrup,” said William McKinnon, co-author of the study and a professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, told theSource.

However, before imagining that this ocean could be home to fish, squid and other marine life, McKinnon explains that “life as we know it” could not be present in the ammonia-laden subsurface ocean on Pluto, but other unknown “primitive” creatures could be present.

“It’s no place for germs, much less fish or squid, or any life as we know it. But as with the methane seas on Titan—Saturn’s main moon—it raises the question of whether some truly novel life forms could exist in these exotic, cold liquids,” McKinnon said.

“If you’re going to talk about life in an ocean that’s completely covered with an ice shell, it seems most likely that the best you could hope for is some extremely primitive kind of organism. It might even be pre-cellular, like we think the earliest life on Earth was,” he added.

The researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing topographical and compositional data using computer models. The said data was sent by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of Pluto in July 2015.

The study aims to give clues on how the basin on Pluto, which includes its icy heart region, was formed, theorizing that a 125-mile-wide object could have collided with the planet around 4 billion years ago.

However, despite offering new insight on what lies on Pluto, McKinnon said that to confirm its existence, gravity measurements, subsurface radar sounding and more explorations are needed.

“It’s up to the next generation to pick up where New Horizons left off!” he said.

Astronomers discovered planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, in the 1990s. We quickly went from knowing of only our own planetary system to realizing that planets likely outnumber the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy. Now, a team of scientists is finding ways to improve our understanding of planet demographics by searching for rogue worlds.

“As our view of the universe has expanded, we’ve realized that our solar system may be unusual,” said Samson Johnson, a graduate student at Ohio State University in Columbus who led the research effort. “Roman will help us learn more about how we fit in the cosmic scheme of things by studying rogue planets.”

The findings, published in the Astronomical Journal, center on the Roman Space Telescope’s ability to locate and characterize isolated planets. Astronomers have only tentatively discovered a few of these nomad worlds so far because they are so difficult to detect.

Finding galactic nomads

Roman will find rogue planets by conducting a large microlensing survey. Gravitational lensing is an observational effect that occurs because the presence of mass warps the fabric of space-time. The effect is extreme around very massive objects, like black holes and entire galaxies. Even solitary planets cause a detectable degree of warping, called microlensing.

If a rogue planet aligns closely with a more distant star from our vantage point, the star’s light will bend as it travels through the curved space-time around the planet. The result is that the planet acts like a natural magnifying glass, amplifying light from the background star. Astronomers see the effect as a spike in the star’s brightness as the star and planet come into alignment. Measuring how the spike changes over time reveals clues to the rogue planet’s mass.

“The microlensing signal from a rogue planet only lasts between a few hours and a couple of days and then is gone forever,” said co-author Matthew Penny, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “This makes them difficult to observe from Earth, even with multiple telescopes. Roman is a game-changer for rogue planet searches.”

Microlensing offers the best way to systematically search for rogue planets – especially those with low masses. They don’t shine like stars and are often very cool objects, emitting too little heat for infrared telescopes to see. These vagabond worlds are essentially invisible, but Roman will discover them indirectly thanks to their gravitational effects on the light of more distant stars.

Lessons from cosmic castaways

Johnson and co-authors showed that Roman will be able to detect rogue planets with masses as small as Mars. Studying these planets will help narrow down competing models of planetary formation.

The planet-building process can be chaotic, since smaller objects collide with one another and sometimes stick together to form larger bodies. It’s similar to using a piece of playdough to pick up other pieces. But occasionally collisions and close encounters can be so violent that they fling a planet out of the gravitational grip of its parent star. Unless it manages to drag a moon along with it, the newly orphaned world is doomed to wander the galaxy alone.

Rogue planets may also form in isolation from clouds of gas and dust, similar to how stars grow. A small cloud of gas and dust could collapse to form a central planet instead of a star, with moons instead of planets surrounding it.

Roman will test planetary formation and evolution models that predict different numbers of these isolated worlds. Determining the abundance and masses of rogue planets will offer insight into the physics that drives their formation. The research team found that the mission will provide a rogue planet count that is at least 10 times more precise than current estimates, which range from tens of billions to trillions in our galaxy. These estimates mainly come from observations by ground-based telescopes.

Since Roman will observe above the atmosphere, nearly a million miles away from Earth in the direction opposite the Sun, it will yield far superior microlensing results. In addition to providing a sharper view, Roman’s perspective will allow it to stare at the same patch of sky continuously for months at a time. Johnson and his colleagues showed that Roman’s microlensing survey will detect hundreds of rogue planets, even though it will search only a relatively narrow strip of the galaxy.

Part of the study involved determining how to analyze the mission’s future data to obtain a more accurate census. Scientists will be able to extrapolate from Roman’s rogue planet count to estimate how common these objects are throughout the entire galaxy.

“The universe could be teeming with rogue planets and we wouldn’t even know it,” said Scott Gaudi, a professor of astronomy at Ohio State University and a co-author of the paper. “We would never find out without undertaking a thorough, space-based microlensing survey like Roman is going to do.”

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at Goddard, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from research institutions across the United States.

Banner: High-resolution illustration of the Roman spacecraft against a starry background. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Hubble researchers suggest that the dust cloud formed when superhot plasma unleashed from an upwelling of a large convection cell on the star’s surface passed through the hot atmosphere to the colder outer layers, where it cooled and formed dust grains. The resulting dust cloud blocked light from about a quarter of the star’s surface, beginning in late 2019. By April 2020, the star returned to normal brightness.

Betelgeuse is an aging, red supergiant star that has swelled in size due to complex, evolving changes in its nuclear fusion furnace at the core. The star is so huge now that if it replaced the Sun at the center of our solar system, its outer surface would extend past the orbit of Jupiter.

The unprecedented phenomenon for Betelgeuse’s great dimming, eventually noticeable to even the naked eye, started in October 2019. By mid-February 2020, the monster star had lost more than two-thirds of its brilliance.

This four-panel graphic illustrates how the southern region of the rapidly evolving, bright, red supergiant star Betelgeuse may have suddenly become fainter for several months during late 2019 and early 2020. In the first two panels, as seen in ultraviolet light with the Hubble Space Telescope, a bright, hot blob of plasma is ejected from the emergence of a huge convection cell on the star’s surface. In panel three, the outflowing, expelled gas rapidly expands outward. It cools to form an enormous cloud of obscuring dust grains. The final panel reveals the huge dust cloud blocking the light (as seen from Earth) from a quarter of the star’s surface.

Illustration credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Wheatley (STScI)

This sudden dimming has mystified astronomers, who scrambled to develop several theories for the abrupt change. One idea was that a huge, cool, dark “star spot” covered a wide patch of the visible surface. But the Hubble observations, led by Andrea Dupree, associate director of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA), Cambridge, Massachusetts, suggest a dust cloud covering a portion of the star.

Several months of Hubble’s ultraviolet-light spectroscopic observations of Betelgeuse, beginning in January 2019, yield a timeline leading up to the darkening. These observations provide important new clues to the mechanism behind the dimming.

Hubble captured signs of dense, heated material moving through the star’s atmosphere in September, October, and November 2019. Then, in December, several ground-based telescopes observed the star decreasing in brightness in its southern hemisphere.

“With Hubble, we see the material as it left the star’s visible surface and moved out through the atmosphere, before the dust formed that caused the star to appear to dim,” Dupree said. “We could see the effect of a dense, hot region in the southeast part of the star moving outward.

“This material was two to four times more luminous than the star’s normal brightness,” she continued. “And then, about a month later, the south part of Betelgeuse dimmed conspicuously as the star grew fainter. We think it is possible that a dark cloud resulted from the outflow that Hubble detected. Only Hubble gives us this evidence that led up to the dimming.”

The team’s paper will appear online Aug. 13 in The Astrophysical Journal.

Massive supergiant stars like Betelgeuse are important because they expel heavy elements such as carbon into space that become the building blocks of new generations of stars. Carbon is also a basic ingredient for life as we know it.

Tracing a Traumatic Outburst

Dupree’s team began using Hubble early last year to analyze the behemoth star. Their observations are part of a three-year Hubble study to monitor variations in the star’s outer atmosphere. Betelgeuse is a variable star that expands and contracts, brightening and dimming, on a 420-day cycle.

Hubble’s ultraviolet-light sensitivity allowed researchers to probe the layers above the star’s surface, which are so hot — more than 20,000 degrees Fahrenheit — they cannot be detected at visible wavelengths. These layers are heated partly by the star’s turbulent convection cells bubbling up to the surface.

Hubble spectra, taken in early and late 2019, and in 2020, probed the star’s outer atmosphere by measuring magnesium II (singly ionized magnesium) lines. In September through November 2019, the researchers measured material moving about 200,000 miles per hour passing from the star’s surface into its outer atmosphere.

This hot, dense material continued to travel beyond Betelgeuse’s visible surface, reaching millions of miles from the seething star. At that distance, the material cooled down enough to form dust, the researchers said.

This interpretation is consistent with Hubble ultraviolet-light observations in February 2020, which showed that the behavior of the star’s outer atmosphere returned to normal, even though visible-light images showed that it was still dimming.

Although Dupree does not know the outburst’s cause, she thinks it was aided by the star’s pulsation cycle, which continued normally though the event, as recorded by visible-light observations. The paper’s co-author, Klaus Strassmeier, of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, used the institute’s automated telescope called STELLar Activity (STELLA), to measure changes in the velocity of the gas on the star’s surface as it rose and fell during the pulsation cycle. The star was expanding in its cycle at the same time as the upwelling of the convective cell. The pulsation rippling outward from Betelgeuse may have helped propel the outflowing plasma through the atmosphere.

Dupree estimates that about two times the normal amount of material from the southern hemisphere was lost over the three months of the outburst. Betelgeuse, like all stars, is losing mass all the time, in this case at a rate 30 million times higher than the Sun.

Betelgeuse is so close to Earth, and so large, that Hubble has been able to resolve surface features – making it the only such star, except for our Sun, where surface detail can be seen.

Hubble images taken by Dupree in 1995 first revealed a mottled surface containing massive convection cells that shrink and swell, which cause them to darken and brighten.

A Supernova Precursor?

The red supergiant is destined to end its life in a supernova blast. Some astronomers think the sudden dimming may be a pre-supernova event. The star is relatively nearby, about 725 light-years away, which means the dimming would have happened around the year 1300. But its light is just reaching Earth now.

“No one knows what a star does right before it goes supernova, because it’s never been observed,” Dupree explained. “Astronomers have sampled stars maybe a year ahead of them going supernova, but not within days or weeks before it happened. But the chance of the star going supernova anytime soon is pretty small.”

Dupree will get another chance to observe the star with Hubble in late August or early September. Right now, Betelgeuse is in the daytime sky, too close to the Sun for Hubble observations. But NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) has taken images of the monster star from its location in space. Those observations show that Betelgeuse dimmed again from mid-May to mid-July, although not as dramatically as earlier in the year.

Dupree hopes to use STEREO for more follow-up observations to monitor Betelgeuse’s brightness. Her plan is to observe Betelgeuse again next year with STEREO when the star has expanded outward again in its cycle to see if it unleashes another petulant outburst.