Related papers: Betelgeuse and the red supergiants
Betelgeuse is the nearest red supergiant, one of the brightest stars in our sky, and statistically speaking it would be expected to be "typical". Yet it exhibits many features that seem "curious", to say the least. For instance it has a…
Betelgeuse has fascinated people since they first looked at the sky. Here we present a contemporary summary of the observations and theory that lead to our understanding of Betelgeuse as a massive red supergiant doomed to collapse and…
The behavior of the bright red supergiant, Betelgeuse, is described with results principally from the past 6 years. The review includes imaging, photometry, and spectroscopy to record the Great Dimming of 2019--2020. This event was followed…
Red supergiants are the most common final evolutionary stage of stars that have initial masses between 8 and 35 times that of the Sun. During this stage, which lasts roughly 100,000 years1, red supergiants experience substantial mass loss.…
Betelgeuse is the nearest Red Supergiant star and it underwent an unusually deep minimum at optical wavelengths during its most recent pulsation cycle. We present submillimetre observations taken by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope and…
Since October 2019, Betelgeuse began to dim noticeably and by January 2020 its brightness had dropped by a factor of approximately 2.5, demoting it from the position of the top (apparent) brightest 11 th star to the 21 st!!! Astronomers…
Betelgeuse, the nearest red supergiant, dimmed to an unprecedented level in early 2020. The star emerged from this Great Dimming episode with its typical, roughly 400-day pulsation cycle halved, and a new dominant period of around 200 days.…
Recent analyses conclude that Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star (HD 39801), likely has a companion object with a period of about 2000 days orbiting at only 2.3 stellar radii, deep in the chromosphere of the supergiant. A probable detection…
In the past six years, Betelgeuse has been in the news and drawn significant public interest. Starting in October 2019, Betelgeuse underwent a striking dimming event, fading from magnitude 0.5 to 1.7 by mid February 2020 a threefold…
The semi-regular variable star Betelgeuse is undergoing an historical minimum of its brightness. An 8 year series of visual and V-band CCD observations started at the end of 2011 is presented and discussed. Visual methods for comparing…
The dynamics of the surface and inner atmosphere of the red supergiant star Betelgeuse are the subject of numerous high angular resolution and spectroscopic studies. Here, we present three-telescope interferometric data obtained at 11.15…
Despite being the best studied red supergiant star in our Galaxy, the physics behind the photometric variability and mass loss of Betelgeuse is poorly understood. Moreover, recently the star has experienced an unusual fading with its visual…
We examine a century of radial velocity, visual magnitude, and astrometric observations of the nearest red supergiant, Betelgeuse, in order to reexamine the century-old assertion that Betelgeuse might be a spectroscopic binary. These data…
Betelgeuse, one of the most studied red supergiant stars, dimmed in the optical by ~1.2 mag between late 2019 and early 2020, reaching an historical minimum called "the Great Dimming." Thanks to enormous observational effort to date, two…
Betelgeuse is a well known bright red supergiant that shows semi-regular variations with four approximate periods of 2200, 420, 230, and 185 days. While the longest period was customarily regarded as LSP (long secondary period) of unknown…
We conduct a rigorous examination of the nearby red supergiant Betelgeuse by drawing on the synthesis of new observational data and three different modeling techniques. Our observational results include the release of new, processed…
Our team has obtained observations of the photosphere of the two closest red supergiant stars Betelgeuse ($\alpha$ Ori) and Antares ($\alpha$ Sco) using near infrared interferometry. We have been monitoring the photosphere of Betelgeuse…
After core hydrogen burning, massive stars evolve from blue-white dwarfs to red supergiants by expanding, brightening, and cooling within few millennia. We discuss a previously neglected constraint on mass, age, and evolutionary state of…
We present optical spectrophotometry of the red supergiant Betelgeuse from 2020 February 15, during its recent unprecedented dimming episode. By comparing this spectrum to stellar atmosphere models for cool supergiants, as well as…
During October 2019 and March 2020, the luminous red supergiant Betelgeuse demonstrated an unusually deep minimum of its brightness. It became fainter by more than one magnitude and this is the most significant dimming observed in the…