(WWJ) – If you look up in the night sky right about now, you’ll notice the Orion constellation is very visible right now.
Its brightest star, Betelgeuse, has been grabbing headlines in recent weeks, as some scientists believe it may explode.
On this week’s episode of “All Over the Space,” Mike Murray from the Delta College Planetarium joined WWJ’s Erin Vee to talk about Betelgeuse.
"It's a variable star, meaning it changes in brightness and it pulsates, but it seemed as though it was losing a lot of brightness, a lot more than normal," Murray said. "And people were starting to wonder, 'uh oh, does that mean it's ready to go supernova?"
Murray says Betelgeuse likely expelled a huge eruption, which also meant a huge cloud of dark gas and dust, which is what caused it to fade.
"It was not that it was shrinking and getting ready to explode, like they thought," Murray said.
They also talked about the launch of the $10 billion Webb Telescope, which is now in the alignment stage after launching on Christmas Day. Vee asked whether we could soon see the first images from the satellite.
“The first official release of images after being aligned won’t happen until June, but what happening is the mirror is going through its testing because it has 18 different hexagonal segments and each one has to be perfectly aligned to give you that perfect parabolic shape, and that is going to take months,” Murray said.
“But they have confirmed that the camera works and that the mirrors are gathering light and it’s going into the camera.”
NASA recently confirmed the telescope successfully detected its first photons.
Related
