A red supergiant has expelled a cloud 1.4 light-years wide, and astronomers cannot yet explain why
the gist
ALMA observations have revealed a cloud of gas and dust around Stephenson 2 DFK 52, a red supergiant in the Milky Way. At 1.4 light-years across, it is the largest ejected cloud ever found around a supergiant. The star is 10 to 15 times the Sun's mass and has already lost 5 to 10 percent of it. The data show that about 4,000 years ago it went through an episode of extreme mass loss, then slowed to a rate closer to Betelgeuse's. Astronomers were expecting a cloud similar to Betelgeuse's, so the scale surprised them. Questions remain about whether a companion star was involved and why the cloud's shape is so complex. The star is expected to end as a supernova within the next million years.
so what
Understanding how a star sheds so much mass in a short time helps predict how massive stars die, and what supernovae look like when they happen.
fun fact
Betelgeuse, a red supergiant in Orion, is one of the best-known stars in the night sky.
In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.
how it works
To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.
so what
A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.
the bigger pattern
Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.
fun fact
In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.
more on this
background
A Corner in Wheat is a 1909 American short silent film which tells of a greedy tycoon who tries to corner the market in wheat, destroying the lives of the people who can no longer afford to buy bread. It was directed by D. W. Griffith and adapted by Griffith and Frank E. Woods from a novel and a short story by Frank Norris, titled The Pit and "A Deal in Wheat". Griffith may have had a real-life inspiration: six months earlier, James A. Patten had actually cornered the market in wheat, and in some cities, the price of bread doubled from five cents to ten, just as in the movie.
In 1994, A Corner in Wheat was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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