The supergiant star Antares could use a supergiant dust mop. The star has created clumps of dust that can be more than a billion miles across. The dust can be both a help and a hindrance. It tells us something about the star itself. But it also makes it more difficult to see the “edge” of the star.
Antares is in good view early tomorrow, just a whisker away from the Moon.
The star is many times heavier than the Sun, hundreds of times wider, and tens of thousands of times brighter. But the exact details are hard to pin down. In part, that’s because it’s hard to pin down the star’s distance. One reason for the uncertainty is that Antares expels a lot of gas into space. That makes Antares look “fuzzy.” And the fuzzier a star looks, the tougher it is to measure its distance.
Sometimes, the gas is blown out in big clumps. Bubbles many times bigger than the Sun may well up from inside the star. As the blobs move farther from Antares, they get cooler. That allows atoms and molecules to stick together to make small solid grains of dust. The composition of the dust reveals some details about the star and its environment.
Astronomers have discovered several clumps of dust that are big enough to encompass most of our own solar system. They contribute to the uncertainty over the size of Antares – making it a little more difficult to pin down the details of this massive star.
We’ll have more dusty skies tomorrow.
Script by Damond Benningfield