The released video is made up of the best available images of the turbulent surface of the star R Goldfish taken by a network of radio telescopes in Chile called the Large Atacama Millimeter and Submillimeter Array, or ALMA for short. The recorded images show bubbles of plasma created by the heat rising from the core of the star and hitting the surface so violently that it appears to cause the star to change shape.
“We never expected the data to be of such high quality that we can see so much detail of the convective process at the surface of the star,” said Water Wellmings, the research team leader and a professor at Chalmers University of Technology, in a statement.
We know that stars have convective processes; Because the heat produced in the core moves outward and appears as a bubble on the surface of the star. In our own Sun, convective grains are typically seen nearly a thousand kilometers in diameter, boiling from the center and collapsing at the edges, lasting nearly 20 minutes before dissipating.
Looking at the most recent images of R Goldfish taken by ALMA from early January to August of last year, Velmings and his colleagues estimate that the star’s plasma bubbles rise and fall in a monthly cycle; This means that they rise and fall much faster than similar convective grains seen on the surface of the sun. Scientists do not yet know the reason for this difference.
Although the golden fish is incredibly inflated, its mass is about the same as our sun; As a result, the members of the study team think that this star is a reflection of the fate of our sun in the next five billion years; When our life-giving star enters the red giant phase, it becomes so swollen that it will swallow Mercury and Venus.
“Convection seems to change as the star gets bigger in ways we don’t yet understand,” says Velmings. ALMA’s new images of R. Goldfish represent an important first step toward understanding the strange changes in red giants.
The research findings have been published in the journal Nature.
