It is s chilling glimpse into the future.
Astronomers have spotted a red giant, a dying star, similar in mass to our own.
Located 530 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Grus (The Crane), the remarkable image shows our own sun’s fate in around five billion years.
Located 530 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Grus (The Crane), pi1 Gruis is a cool red giant 350 times larger and several thousand times as bright as our sun. Our sun will swell to become a similar red giant star in about five billion years.
It is the first time astronomers, who used ESO’s Very Large Telescope, have directly observed granulation patterns on the surface of a star outside the Solar System.
The ageing red giant known as pi1 Gruis is covered in convective cells that make up the surface of this huge star, which has 350 times the diameter of the Sun.
Each cell covers more than a quarter of the star’s diameter and measures about 120 million kilometres across.
Just one of these granules would extend from the Sun to beyond Venus.
By comparison, our sun’s photosphere contains about two million convective cells, with typical diameters of just 1500 kilometres.
These new results are being published this week in the journal Nature.
Located 530 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Grus (The Crane), pi1 Gruis is a cool red giant.
It has about the same mass as our Sun, but is 350 times larger and several thousand times as bright.
Our Sun will swell to become a similar red giant star in about five billion years.
An international team of astronomers led by Claudia Paladini (ESO) used the PIONIER instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope to observe pi1 Gruis in greater detail than ever before.
The surfaces — known as photospheres — of many giant stars are obscured by dust, which hinders observations.
When pi1 Gruis ran out of hydrogen to burn long ago, this ancient star ceased the first stage of its nuclear fusion programme.
Life on Earth will be burnt to a crisp in five billion years’ time. By then the sun will grow to a hundred times bigger than it is today, swallowing up Mercury and Venus, before it dies as a white dwarf star two billion years later. Artist’s impression of a molten Earth
It shrank as it ran out of energy, causing it to heat up to over 100 million degrees.
These extreme temperatures fueled the star’s next phase as it began to fuse helium into heavier atoms such as carbon and oxygen.
This intensely hot core then expelled the star’s outer layers, causing it to balloon to hundreds of times larger than its original size.
Located 530 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Grus (The Crane), pi1 Gruis is a cool red giant
The star we see today is a variable red giant.
Until now, the surface of one of these stars has never before been imaged in detail.
While stars more massive than eight solar masses end their lives in dramatic supernovae explosions, less massive stars like this one gradually expel their outer layers, resulting in beautiful planetary nebulae.