Betelgeuse

This article is about the star. For the film, see Beetlejuice. For other uses, see Betelgeuse (disambiguation).
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star of spectral type M1-2 and one of the largest visible to the naked eye. It is usually the tenth-brightest star in the night sky and, after Rigel, the second-brightest in the constellation of Orion. It is a distinctly reddish, semiregular variable star whose apparent magnitude, varying between +0.0 and +1.6, has the widest range displayed by any first-magnitude star. At near-infrared wavelengths, Betelgeuse is the brightest star in the night sky. Its Bayer designation is α Orionis, Latinised to Alpha Orionis and abbreviated Alpha Ori or α Ori.
With a radius around 640 times that of the Sun, if it were at the center of our Solar System, its surface would lie beyond the asteroid belt and it would engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Calculations of Betelgeuse's mass range from slightly under ten to a little over twenty times that of the Sun. For various reasons, its distance has been quite difficult to measure; current best estimates are of the order of 400–600 light-years from the Sun – a comparatively wide uncertainty for a relatively nearby star. Its absolute magnitude is about −6. Less than 10 million years old, Betelgeuse has evolved rapidly because of its large mass and is expected to end its evolution with a supernova explosion, most likely within 100,000 years. When Betelgeuse explodes, it will shine as bright as the half-Moon for more than three months; life on Earth will be unharmed. Having been ejected from its birthplace in the Orion OB1 association – which includes the stars in Orion's Belt – this runaway star has been observed to be moving through the interstellar medium at a speed of 30 km/s, creating a bow shock over four light-years wide.
In 1920, Betelgeuse became the first extrasolar star whose photosphere's angular size was measured. Subsequent studies have reported an angular diameter (i.e., apparent size) ranging from 0.042 to 0.056 arcseconds; that range of determinations is ascribed to non-sphericity, limb darkening, pulsations and varying appearance at different wavelengths. It is also surrounded by a complex, asymmetric envelope, roughly 250 times the size of the star, caused by mass loss from the star itself. The Earth-observed angular diameter of Betelgeuse is exceeded only by those of R Doradus and the Sun.
Starting in October 2019, Betelgeuse began to dim noticeably, and by mid-February 2020 its brightness had dropped by a factor of approximately 3, from magnitude 0.5 to 1.7. It then returned to a more normal brightness range, reaching a peak of 0.0 visual and 0.1 V-band magnitude in April 2023. Infrared observations found no significant change in luminosity over the last 50 years, suggesting that the dimming was due to a change in extinction around the star rather than a more fundamental change. A study using the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that occluding dust was created by a surface mass ejection; this material was cast millions of miles from the star, and then cooled to form the dust that caused the dimming.
== Nomenclature ==
The star's designation is α Orionis (Latinised to Alpha Orionis), given by Johann Bayer in 1603.
The traditional name Betelgeuse was derived from the Arabic يد الجوزاء Yad al-Jawzā’ "the hand of al-Jawzā’ [i.e. Orion]". An error in the 13th-century reading of the Arabic initial yā’ (يـ) as bā’ (بـ) led to the European name. In English, there are four common pronunciations of this name, depending on whether the first e is pronounced short or long and whether the s is pronounced /s/ or /z/:
* /ˈbɛtəldʒuːz/ BET-əl-jooz;
* /ˈbiːtəldʒuːz/ BEE-təl-jooz;
* /ˈbɛtəldʒuːs/ BET-əl-jooss;
* /ˈbiːtəldʒuːs/ BEE-təl-jooss, popularized for sounding like "beetle juice".
In 2016, the International Astronomical Union organized a Working Group on Star Names (WGSN) to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN's first bulletin, issued July 2016, included a table of the first two batches of names approved by the WGSN, which included Betelgeuse for this star. It is now so entered in the IAU Catalog of Star Names.
== Observational history ==
Betelgeuse and its red coloration have been noted since antiquity; the classical astronomer Ptolemy described its color as ὑπόκιρρος (hypókirrhos = more or less orange-tawny), a term later described by a translator of Ulugh Beg's Zij-i Sultani as rubedo, Latin for "ruddiness". In the 19th century, before modern systems of stellar classification, Angelo Secchi included Betelgeuse as one of the prototypes for his Class III (orange to red) stars. By contrast, three centuries before Ptolemy, Chinese astronomers observed Betelgeuse as yellow; if accurate, such an observation could suggest the star was in a yellow supergiant phase around this time, a credible possibility, given current research into these stars' complex circumstellar environment.