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Betelgeuse, in the constellation Orion, is one of the brightest stars in the night sky and is the second-largest star in apparent size from our vantage point (not counting the sun, that is). Those attributes are made all the more impressive by the fact that Betelgeuse is some 650 light-years away—nowhere near cracking the list of the closest stars to our solar system.
Its brightness and size arise from the fact that the star is a red supergiant, a stage late in the life cycle of some stars in which they swell to great size. Estimates of Betelgeuse's physical size vary, but it is at least several hundred times the diameter of the sun.
Using observation data taken in 2005 at the now-defunct Infrared Optical Telescope Array in Arizona, Xavier Haubois and Guy Perrin of the Paris Observatory and their colleagues reconstructed an infrared image of the massive star. The researchers published their findings in December 2009 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The highly detailed portrait revealed two bright spots on Betelgeuse of the kind that have long been known to swirl across the surface, two or three at a time. These spots could be markers of convection within the red supergiant, the authors report, and may trace the influence of Betelgeuse's magnetic field on its surface in much the same way that sunspots do on the sun.
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12 Comments
Add CommentTOTALLY COOL.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAwesome article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRun. Run fast.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut then on the other hand, Betelgeuse goes really good with swedish meatballs! Try it.
Oh. So I take it there are no fuzzy little aliens running around on it like the New Age guys seem to take as common knowledge. ...or is it just a firey external shell to trick us??? What better disguise!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAyeeeee
Well what the heck is the rest of the story? What can we expect to see happen in the night sky? If it is in the late stage of this process... what and when...?!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Late stage of the life cycle.." so what's the rest of the story? What can we expect to see in our night sky and when? Can this be the fabled change in Orion that we hear about? The one that will mark a big change on the planet Earth? Sure sounds like it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah, that'll happen Dec. 22, 2012. ;-)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother disappointingly *smaller* image offered by "click to enlarge".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsn't there one editor in the house who watched Sesame Street?
I wonder if these spots could be (ex)planets that are now with in the outer shell of the star...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe pic accompanying this article had as a scale a line showing "10mas" What's a "mas"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThose spots are many times larger than our Sun is, a planet would be smaller than a single pixel on that picture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisyeah, but the disturbance would be many times the size...think of the comet that hit Jupiter and the size that resulted. 5km became 10000km. Anyhow, just a thought.
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