Betelgeuse

[shadowmane]

Recently there have been some new articles about Betelgeuse and how it is dimming. In most of the articles, they believe it is getting ready to go nova. Given some of the hypotheses here, there would have to be another star, or gas giant getting ready to enter the system, as, from my understanding, a supernova is nothing short of two stars coming together in the EU. Could there be a brown dwarf entering orbit of Betelgeuse, or might there be something altogether different happening? Perhaps a less power coming from its galactic circuit?

[Xuxalina Rihhia]

I believe the most logical answer to Betelgeuse's dimming is less electrical power from the galactic circuit. It is a variable star in visible light.

[nick c]

The Mystery of the Shrinking Red Star

Red stars are those stars that cannot satisfy their hunger for electrons from the surrounding plasma. So the star expands the surface area over which it collects electrons by growing a large plasma sheath that becomes the effective collecting area of the stellar anode in space. The growth process is self-limiting because, as the sheath expands, its electric field will grow stronger. Electrons caught up in the field are accelerated to ever-greater energies. Before long, they become energetic enough to excite neutral particles they chance to collide with, and the huge sheath takes on a uniform ‘red anode glow.’ It becomes a red giant star.

The electric field driving this process will also give rise to a massive flow of positive ions away from the star, or in more familiar words—a prodigious stellar ‘wind.’ Indeed, such mass loss is a characteristic feature of red giants. Standard stellar theory is at a loss to explain this since the star is said to be too ‘cold’ to ‘boil off’ a stellar wind. And radiation pressure is totally inadequate. So when seen in electric terms, instead of being near the end point of its life, a red giant may be a ‘child’ losing sufficient mass and charge to begin the next phase of its existence— on the main sequence.