Related papers: Will Betelguese Explode?
Betelgeuse is a pulsating red supergiant whose brightness is semi periodically variable and in February 2020 reached a historical minimum, the Great Dimming. The aims of this study are to characterize Betelgeuse's variability based on…
Recent numerical simulations by Freytag et al. of the outer convection envelope of the cool super-giant Betelgeuse, have shown that the fluctuations in the star's apparent luminosity may be caused by giant cell convection. These simulations…
Critical transitions occur in complex dynamical systems, when the system dynamics undergoes a regime shift. These can often occur with little change in the mean amplitude of system response prior to the actual time of transition. The recent…
We discuss the physics and the evolution of a typical massive star passing through an evolutionary stage similar to that of Betelgeuse. After a brief introduction recalling various observed parameters of Betelgeuse, we discuss the…
The 'Great Dimming' of the prototypical red supergiant Betelgeuse, which occurred between December 2019 and April 2020, gives us unprecedented insight into the processes occurring on the stellar surface and in the inner wind of this type of…
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 present spatially resolved observations of Betelgeuse (Alpha Orionis) obtained with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) at wavelengths of ~7mm (44~GHz) and ~1.3cm (22~GHz) on 2019 August 2, just prior to the onset of the historical…
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…
The dramatic dimming episode of the red supergiant Betelgeuse in 2019/2020, caused by a partial darkening of the stellar disk, has highlighted gaps in the understanding of the evolution of massive stars. We analyzed numerical models to…
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…
Recently published episodic spectral (Levesque and Massey, 2020) and high angular resolution (Montarges et al, 2020) observations of Betelgeuse suggest that the deep minimum of 2019-2020 was caused by an enhanced dust abundance in the…
The processes that shape the extended atmospheres of red supergiants (RSGs), heat their chromospheres, create molecular reservoirs, drive mass loss, and create dust remain poorly understood. Betelgeuse's V-band "Great Dimming" event of 2019…
Betelgeuse -- the closest M-supergiant to the Sun -- has recently been predicted to host a lower-mass stellar companion that orbits the primary with a period of $\sim 6$ years. The putative stellar companion is thought to cause the long…
We assess whether gravity darkening, induced by a tidal interaction during a stellar fly-by, might be sufficient to explain the Great Dimming of Betelgeuse. Adopting several simple approximations, we calculate the tidal deformation and…
Betelgeuse has gone through a sudden shift in its brightness and dimmed mysteriously. This is likely caused by a hot blob of plasma ejected from Betelgeuse and then cooled to obscuring dust. If true, it is a remarkable opportunity to…
The asteroid (147857) 2005 UW381 will pass over the supergiant star Betelgeuse on January 2nd 2012. The event is visible on a limited geographical region, and the magnitude drop is only 0.01 magnitudes for a maximum duration of 3.6 seconds.…
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…
We explore the possibility that the star alpha Orionis (Betelgeuse) is the outcome of a merger that occurred in a low mass ratio (q = M2/M1 = 0.07 - 0.25) binary system some time in the past hundreds of thousands of years. To that goal, we…
We investigate the merger between a 16 solar mass star, on its way to becoming a red supergiant (RSG), and a 4 solar mass main-sequence companion. Our study employs three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulations using the state-of-the-art…
Gamma-ray burst astronomy has undergone a revolution in the last three years, spurred by the discovery of fading long-wavelength counterparts. We now know that at least the long duration GRBs lie at cosmological distances with estimated…