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Although stars are enormous, they\u2019re extremely far away, and appear as point sources in telescopes. Usually, you never get to see more than a pixel. Now astronomers have used the Atacama Large Millimeter\/submillimeter Array (ALMA) to resolve details on the surface of the star R Doradus and track its activity for 30 days. The images revealed giant, hot bubbles of gas 75 times larger than the entire Sun. R Doradus is 350 times larger than our Sun, but only 180 light-years away.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the first time the bubbling surface of a real star can be shown in such a way,\u201c said Wouter Vlemmings, a professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and lead author of the study, in a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n In the study, published in Nature, the astronomers detailed how they observed R Doradus, a massive red supergiant star, over four weeks between July 2 and August 2, 2023. The observations were made using the longest available ALMA baselines. The images revealed a stellar disk with prominent small-scale features that provide the structure and motions of convection on the stellar surface.<\/p>\n Convection is the mixing of gas within a star, where heated gas from the interior of the star created by nuclear fusion in the core rises to the surface and the cooler, denser gas on the star\u2019s photosphere sinks. This continuous motion also distributes the heavy elements formed in the core, such as carbon and nitrogen, throughout the star, and convection is also thought to be responsible for the stellar winds that carry these elements out into the cosmos to build new stars and planets.<\/p>\n \n