Boiling bubbles, 75x larger than the Sun, spotted at THIS distance from Earth

In a stunning discovery, astronomers have been able to catch a glimpse of a star which has boiling bubbles of gas on its surface.

The star on which the activity has been seen is a red giant star, named R Doradus, with a diameter which is nearly 350 times bigger than the sun.

The boiling giant star is around 180 light-years away from Earth and is located in the southern constellation Dorado.

Even though R Doradus is much larger than the sun, however, the star is expected to look like our sun and behave like it for the next five billion years by turning into a red giant when it comes closer to death.

"This is the first time the bubbling surface of a real star can be shown in such a way," said Wouter Vlemmings, who is the study's lead author,in a statement.

#BreakingNews For the first time, astronomers have captured images of a star other than the Sun in enough detail to track the motion of bubbling gas on its surface. The images of the star✨, R Doradus, were obtained with ALMA📡, in July and August 2023 🔗https://t.co/CDElA8uACe pic.twitter.com/ET4iBXchZQ

"We had never expected the data to be of such high quality that we could see so many details of the convection on the stellar surface," he added.

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These convection bubbles were captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA).

Spotting of convection bubbles on stars

Astronomers have spotted the convection bubbles on the stars previously, however, ALMA observations have been able to track their motion in a detailed manner for the first time.

“Convection creates the beautiful granular structure seen on the surface of our Sun, but it is hard to see on other stars,” said co-author Theo Khouri.

“With ALMA, we have now been able to not only directly see convective granules – with a size 75 times the size of our Sun! – but also measure how fast they move for the first time," he added.

The findings were published in the journalNature. In the images taken, giant, hot bubbles of gas were seen appearing and then disappearing at a high speed beneath the surface.

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In the new paper, the astronomers have for the first time observed how fast the convective granules are moving.

On R Doradus, the bubbles were seen moving on a one-month cycle which was faster in comparison to how it moved on our Sun.

“It is spectacular that we can now directly image the details on the surface of stars so far away, and observe physics that until now was mostly only observable in our Sun,” said Behzad Bojnodi Arbab, who is a graduate researcher at Chalmers and was part of the study.

(With inputs from agencies)