Astronomers Unveil Star's Bubbles in Stunning Detail

For the first time in history, astronomers have managed to capture images of a star other than the Sun in unprecedented detail to track the movements of bubbling gas on its surface. Astronomers captured the star, R Doradus, using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a telescope owned by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). The pictures show giant bubbles of gas roughly 75 times the size of the Sun, appearing and sinking back in quick movements.

Stars are essentially power plants-- producing energy through nuclear fusion at their cores. This energy doesn’t just sit still; it hitches a ride toward the surface in massive, sizzling gas bubbles that cool and sink back down—much like a celestial lava lamp. This abrupt movement, convection, stirs up the heavy elements like carbon and nitrogen formed in the core and scatters them throughout the star. And here’s where things get even more dramatic: this same process likely triggers the stellar winds that blow these elements into the universe and hence, fuel the creation of new stars and planets.

Until now, we had only tracked these convection motions in the Sun. But thanks to ALMA, scientists have pulled back the curtain on R Doradus. For a month, they captured high-resolution images of its surface, and gave us the first detailed look at these star-sized bubbles outside of our solar system. R Doradus, which is about 350 times wider than the Sun, sits just 180 light-years away in the constellation Dorado, practically in our cosmic backyard. And with a mass similar to the Sun’s, it offers a sneak peek at our star’s future in five billion years, when it, too, will swell into a red giant.

So, in a sense, we’re not just stargazing—we’re time-traveling!

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

added Theo Khouri, a researcher at Chalmers who is a co-author of the study.

As technology like ALMA continues to push the boundaries of astronomical observation, who knows what other cosmic secrets we’ll unravel? With every glimpse of these distant, dynamic stars, we’re not just expanding our knowledge—we’re deepening our connection to the universe, its extraordinaries and furthermores. After all, in the intricate understanding of stars, lies the story of our very own origins.