Astronomers created a detailed 3D map of VY Canis Majoris, a dying red hypergiant star located over 3,000 light-years from Earth. They found that the way this rare supergiant star loses mass is analogous to coronal arcs — loops of plasma that erupt from the sun — but on a scale billions of times larger.
Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the team, led by University of Arizona researchers Ambesh Singh and Lucy Ziurys, traced the distributions and velocities of molecules as they swirled around VY Canis Majoris and mapped them to structures of ejected material that extend for billions of miles.