50 years ago, astronomers saw the surface of a distant star for the first time
Excerpt from the December 21, 1974 & December 28, 1974 issue of Science News
This image of the star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion was taken in 2009 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope.
P. Kervella/AFP via Getty Images
Surface features of a distant star — Science News, December 21, 1974 & December 28, 1974
Thanks to high-speed photography and modern data processing, [astronomers] are beginning to be able to suppress the effects of [a star] twinkling…. The star involved is one of the most prominent in the sky, big, red Betelgeuse.… What was found are large-scale hot and cold regions, that may be convection currents in the star’s atmosphere.
Update
Powerful ground- and space-based telescopes have since let scientists observe the surfaces of giant stars in the Milky Way, including Betelgeuse and R Doradus, in even greater detail. Those observations confirmed that surface spots are related to convection, bubbles of hot and cold gas rising and sinking in a star’s atmosphere (SN: 09/16/24). In November, scientists reported the first close-up image of a star outside of our galaxy (SN: 11/21/24). Using the Very Large Telescope in Chile, astronomers spotted a star puffing out dust and gas in the Large Magellanic Cloud — a small galaxy that orbits our own. That suggests the star, named WOH G64, may be dying.
