For the first time, the bubbling surface of a distant star was captured on video

For the first time, astronomers have obtained detailed images of the turbulent activity in a star other than our Sun.

A time-lapse video released on Wednesday (September 11) shows giant gas bubbles bubbling on a nearby star called R Doradus, a red giant about 300 times larger than our sun which lies about 180 light years away in the southern constellation of Dorado. Like a boiling soup on the stove, the star's glowing material erupts in bubbles on its surface, which astronomers estimate to be up to 75 times the size of our sun.

“It is spectacular that we can now directly image the details on the surface of such distant stars,” says Behzad Bojnodi Arbab, a doctoral student at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and co-author of a new study about the observations, which were published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, said in a opinionThanks to the latest images, astronomers can now “observe physics that was previously largely only observable in our Sun,” Arbab added.

These best images yet of the nearby star R Doradus show giant bubbles of plasma 75 times larger than our Sun rising and setting on its surface. (Image credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/W. Vlemmings et al.)

The video is composed of the best images of the star’s chaotic surface taken by a network of radio telescopes in Chile called the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA in short: “star”. The images show the plasma bubbles, which are driven by the heat rising from the star's core and collide with its surface so violently that they appear to slightly deform the star.

Related: Meet ALMA: Amazing photos of the giant radio telescope facility

“We never expected that the data would be of such high quality that we could see so much detail of convection on the stellar surface,” said the study's lead author Wouter Vlemmings, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology, in the statement.

Using the most recent snapshots of R Doradus taken by ALMA from early July to August last year, Vlemmings and his colleagues estimate that the star's plasma bubbles rise and fall on a one-month cycle, faster than the timing of similar convection cells that are abundant on the surface of our Sun.

“We don’t yet know what the reason for this difference is,” said Vlemmings.

Although R Doradus is incredibly bloated, its mass is similar to that of our Sun, so study team members suspect the star reflects what our Sun will look like in about five billion years, when it enters its red giant phase. to swell up to swallowing mercury and Venus.

“It seems that convection changes as a star ages in ways we don't yet understand,” Vlemmings said.

Previous ALMA observations showed that R Doradus rotates at least two orders of magnitude faster than expected for a red giant. In the new study, Vlemmings and his team ruled out the possibility that the high rotation is an illusion created by the star’s boiling surface, a hypothesis that recently raised by another team of astronomers who Betelgeuseanother red giant in the constellation Orion that is known to rotate 100 times faster than expected.

Vlemmings and his colleagues believe that the rotation speed of R. Doradus is much longer than the one-month cycle of the convection bubbles that they determined. This rules out the possibility that telescopes could be fooled by such a random arrangement of the gas bubbles.

For the first time, the bubbling surface of a distant star was captured on video

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For the first time, the bubbling surface of a distant star was captured on video

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