Antares , the bright whizz in the constellation Scorpio , is a carmine supergiant about 550 light - years from Earth . It is 700 times great than our Sun in visible igniter and 12 times more monolithic , and we now have the best map of its atmosphere . In fact , it ’s the best radio receiver map of any star other than the Sun .
crimson supergiants are immense dusty stars at the close of their life history , spew out fleshy elements into infinite via vast stellar fart . It ’s unknown how these Brobdingnagian winds are launched so astronomer looked at Antares , the closest supergiant whizz to Earth .
The prodigious accomplishment is reported inAstronomy & Astrophysics , and was possible thanks to the combined use of two world - form observatory . The National Science Foundation ’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array ( VLA ) looked at the external part of Antares ' atmosphere , even spotlight the stellar wind publish by this mammoth star . The Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array ( ALMA ) in Chile run in closer , studying the atmosphere just around its surface .
The reflection reveal how large the atmosphere actually is . The region do it as the chromosphere , which was targeted by ALMA , has a radius 2.5 times of Antares and is cooler than previous studies had suggested , with a temperature around 3,500 ° C ( 6,300 ° F ) . The VLA observations show how far out the outer layer of this star topology stint .
“ The size of a asterisk can vary dramatically depending on what wavelength of brightness it is observed with , ” lead author Eamon O’Gorman of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies explain in astatement . “ The long wavelengths of the VLA revealed the supergiant ’s atmosphere out to nearly 12 prison term the star ’s radius . ”
Previous observations of the star were acquit in ultraviolet light and visible Inner Light . That approaching run to pick up the hottest bits of blood plasma in and around a star . Radio and submillimeter instruments are sensitive to cooler material and for this reason , they have been capable to see the atmosphere pass further out .
“ We think that red supergiant whizz , such as Antares andBetelgeuse , have an nonuniform atmosphere , ” said cobalt - generator Keiichi Ohnaka of the Universidad Católica del Norte in Chile , who antecedently observe Antares ’ atmosphere in infrared twinkle . “ suppose that their atmosphere are a house painting made out of many dots of different colouration , representing different temperatures . Most of the painting contains dose of the lukewarm gas that wireless telescopes can see , but there are also cold acid that only infrared telescopes can see , and red-hot back breaker that UV scope see . At the moment we ca n’t observe these dots separately , but we want to try on that in future study . ”
The oeuvre also shows a clear note between the chromosphere and the area where the stellar tip is accelerate . The VLA reflexion also caught some of that steer being illuminated by Antares B , which has a mass about 7 times of the Sun and 5 times its radius .
