Led by NASA Ames scientist Steve Howell, the team used ‘Alopeke, a speckle imager named after the Hawaiian word for fox, to capture high-contrast, short-exposure images that revealed the dim star ...

A simulation of the physical conditions inside Betelgeuse predict what the surface looks like, given hot gas rising, cooling, and falling back inside. Credit: Bernd Freytag.

The giant star Betelgeuse has been observed for thousands of years and its fluctuations in brightness have long been ...

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of a companion star orbiting Betelgeuse, providing answers to the red supergiant's unusual brightness variations.

Taniguchi and his colleagues were able to see Betelgeuse in images taken throughout Himawari-8's lifetime and measured its brightness roughly every 1.7 days between January 2017 and June 2021.

With a star like Betelgeuse, which is significantly more massive (about 20 times our Sun's mass) but also much larger (about the size of Jupiter's orbit), this is still a major problem.

Betelgeuse is expected to follow a very similar pathway to previously observed core-collapse supernovae. NASA/CXC/M.Weiss; X-ray: NASA/CXC/GSFC/U.Hwang & J.Laming What's going on inside these stars?

Betelgeuse, is suddenly dimming. It may be a sign, astronomers say, that the star is about to explode. Another possibility is the red supergiant may just be going through a phase.

But both of those explanations are short on details; we don't really know what's happening inside the star or how enough dust could end up between Betelgeuse and Earth.

In late 2019, the red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion dimmed dramatically, leading astronomers to wonder if the massive star was about to explode in a supernova.. But ...