i need everyone to know that massive stars burp off parts of their surfaces at the ends of their lives. stars can lose a SOLAR MASS of material per year at speeds 5000 times as fast as a supersonic jet. that’s what we think Betelgeuse is doing right now. burping.

while the exact eruption trigger isn’t well constrained, we have a lots of ideas: pressure inversions causing convection & turbulence, super-strong winds, rotation, binary companions, electron-positron pairs providing insufficient pressure to hold up the star—lotsa possibilities!

yes i spend my days quarantine days trying to understand and model stellar burps