It was recently reported that astronomers have made a significant discovery about one of the brightest and most well-known stars in our night sky, Betelgeuse. This incredibly large red supergiant, found in the Orion constellation, is not so lonely – it has a smaller partner star that orbits around it.
This exhorting discovery comes after a stretch in 2019 and 2020 when stargazers turned their telescopes to Betelgeuse because of a surprising and sudden dimming of the star. Researchers later concluded that this brief dimming was due to a huge dust cloud expelled from the star itself.
The new companion star is a key to the puzzle, explaining a regular brightening and dimming of Betelgeuse on a nearly six-year cycle. Prior to this find, researchers had suspected that such a pattern could be the result of an unknown companion.
It took the mighty Gemini North telescope on Hawaii to verify the existence of this elusive star. The companion is thought to be around 1.5 times more massive than the sun, which would make it much smaller than Betelgeuse, which is 1,000 times wider than our sun. Although much smaller than the other star, this companion is only about four times as far away from Betelgeuse as the Earth is from the Sun.
The find, described in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, sheds new light on the complex relationships within this famous and eye-catching celestial phenomenon and adds context to our understanding of stellar systems outside of our own.
