Astronomers have determined through studying data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and a number of other observatories that the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse essentially blew its top in 2019, losing a significant portion of its visible surface and creating a massive Surface Mass Ejection (SME). This is a behaviour in a star that has never before been observed.

NASA TV reported that in a phenomenon known as a Coronal Mass Ejection, our sun periodically throws out portions of its flimsy outer atmosphere, the corona (CME). However, the Betelgeuse SME ejected 400 billion times more mass than an average CME!

The monstrous star is still regaining its strength after this terrible disruption. The interior of Betelgeuse is currently sort of bouncing, according to Andrea Dupree of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

These new discoveries provide information on how red stars lose mass toward the end of their lives when their nuclear fusion furnaces exhaust, leading to their eventual explosion as supernovae. Their fate is highly impacted by the degree of mass loss.

Betelgeuse's unusually obnoxious conduct is hardly a sign that the star is poised to go viral any time soon, either. Therefore, a large-scale loss event is not always an indication of an impending explosion.