What part of the celestial Orion is decorated with the star Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse explosion. Facts about the red giant

One of the stars in the night sky is the brightest Betelgeuse. It is located in the constellation Orion. It can be seen in the night sky even without special instruments. The size of the star is amazing. Its mass exceeds the mass of the Sun by 20 times, and its diameter is more than 1000 times. The distance to Betelgeuse is just over 600 light years (the distance covered by light in a year at a speed of 300,000 km/h is 1 light year).

Betelgeuse (translated from Arabic as “armpit of the twin”) is a supermassive red giant. If you take it and put it in the place of the Sun, then it would reach the orbit of Jupiter, while covering all the planets located inside. Our Sun will emit 50 thousand times less light when compared to Betelgeuse. By galactic standards, this star is still young - about 10 million years old. Stars classified as red supergiants have very short lives. Considering the enormous pressure inside the star created due to its colossal mass, it burns its fuel very quickly, which directly affects the lifespan of the star itself.

Life of a star

The birth of a star is no different from the birth of other stars. In the vastness of the galaxy, a spherical molecular cloud is being formed - a protostar. Then thermonuclear fusion began under the enormous pressure of the star's mass. This process leads to heating of the core. At this stage, hydrogen begins to transform into helium, and enormous energy is released into space. Thanks to this energy, the star does not shrink.

Over time, the hydrogen runs out, which consequently entails a loss of energy and the star still begins to shrink. The core begins to compress with even greater force until the moment when helium begins to transform into another state - turn into carbon. Then a helium flash occurs. At this moment, the star begins to release a colossal amount of energy. From an ordinary star, it turns into a red giant. Betelgeuse is at this stage of life.

New elements (neon, oxygen, etc.) appear before iron is formed. Over time, the fuel runs out and the core begins to shrink again. Inside the star, the iron core is compressed, which subsequently becomes neutron. Then a huge explosion occurs. This explosion is the formation of a type 2 supernova. Instead of a core, a black hole or a neutron star may form.

Is there a danger to the Earth?

There is no clear answer to the question of when Betelgeuse will explode. Some scientists believe that it will happen very soon (in the next 2 thousand years), and there are those who believe that it will happen much later. This explosion does not pose any danger to our planet. However, if the explosion occurs in our time, then you can see an amazingly beautiful picture in the sky. Betelgeuse's brightness will be comparable to that of the Moon, both during the day and at night. However, after a few years, the visibility will weaken and then gradually disappear completely. And in its place it is formed.

Light of Orion. A second sun may appear in the sky.

According to sources at the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, the red giant Betelgeuse, located in the constellation Orion, is rapidly changing its shape.
Only over the past 16 years has the star ceased to be round, it has shrunk at the poles. Such symptoms may indicate that in the very near future (we are talking about months, perhaps even weeks) the star will turn into a supernova.
Earthlings will be able to observe this event with the naked eye. A very bright star will flash in the sky. Scientists disagree on the degree of brightness, some say that it will be equal to the Moon, others promise the appearance of a second Sun.
The entire transformation will take about six weeks. In some parts of the Earth they will learn what white nights are; for others, the unusual phenomenon will add two to three hours to the length of daylight.
Then, the star will finally cool down and will be visible to earthlings in the form of a nebula.
For people, such events in space are not dangerous.
Waves of charged particles - a consequence of the explosion, will, of course, reach our planet, but this will happen in several centuries. Our distant descendants will receive a small dose of ionizing radiation.
The last time such an event was visible to earthlings was in 1054.

Betelgeuse (alpha).

Largest visible star
On the right shoulder of Orion, in the crown of the Winter Hexagon, the beautiful Betelgeuse shines in the winter skies.

Orion constellation. Betelgeuse is a reddish-orange star in the upper left corner of the constellation.

This star is not called Alpha Orionis for nothing, although dazzling bluish Rigel - in the photo in the lower right corner - is brighter most of the time. Betelgeuse is a unique star in many respects, which astronomers have been studying for many years and discovering more and more interesting facts.
First, Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars in the Universe. Its diameter is about a thousand times greater than the diameter of the Sun. Even the largest known star, VY Canis Majoris, is only twice the diameter of Betelgeuse (and therefore eight times the volume). So it’s not for nothing that this star bears the proud title of a red supergiant.
If it were in the place of the Sun, it would almost fill the orbit of Saturn:

Only eight known stars (all red hypergiants) are larger in volume than Betelgeuse, but all of them appear very dim in Earth's sky. The reason is simple: Betelgeuse is much closer than all of them.

Betelgeuse is 640 light years away, and on a galactic scale this is very small. Betelgeuse is the closest supergiant to us.
An interesting conclusion follows from this: Betelgeuse in the earth's sky has the largest apparent diameter of all stars (of course, after the Sun.)
It is clear that everything that is smaller in diameter than a minute of arc is perceived by the human eye as a point. The angular diameters of absolutely all stars (except the Sun) are less than an arc minute, so they all look like points. In fact, of course, all their angular diameters are different. Betelgeuse's angular diameter was first determined in 1920 to be 0.047 arcseconds, which was the largest angular diameter of a star then known. Since then, however, the star R Dorado, invisible in the northern hemisphere, was discovered, the angular diameter of which turned out to be 0.057 arcseconds. But even in the southern hemisphere it is almost invisible: at maximum brightness it is hardly visible to the naked eye, and at minimum it cannot be seen in every telescope. R Dorado is so cold that it emits mostly infrared radiation. But since then, the angular measurements have been refined, and for Betelgeuse the apparent diameter is determined to be from 0.056 to 0.059 arcseconds, which restores its lost position as the largest visible star. It's not so easy to oust the queen of the winter skies!
Not surprisingly, Betelgeuse was the first star for which photographs of its disk were obtained. That is, in which the star looked not like a point, but like a disk. (The fact that the bright stars appear as disks in the above photograph is a convention of the image, which can only convey differences in brightness through differences in size.) The photograph was taken by the Hubble Orbital Telescope in 1995.
Here is this historical image in ultraviolet light (NASA/ESA credit):

It is clear that the colors in the photograph are relative: the redder, the colder. A bright spot near the center of the star is considered one of its poles, that is, Betelgeuse’s rotation axis is directed almost towards us, but slightly to the side.
More recently, namely in July last year (2009), new photographs of Betelgeuse were taken at the ground-based Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Here is one of them:

The resulting photos show that Betelgeuse has a tail. This tail extends six radii of Betelgeuse itself (comparable to the distance from the Sun to Neptune). What kind of tail this is, why it is there and what it means, scientists themselves do not yet know, although there are many assumptions.
Measuring Betelgeuse
It is interesting to give the main parameters of Betelgeuse. We will see that by almost all parameters, Betelgeuse turns out to be one of the “winners” of the known Universe.
In diameter, as already mentioned, Betelgeuse is about a thousand times larger than the Sun. It is very difficult to accurately determine the diameter and distance from the Sun of a single star, and Betelgeuse has no satellites (although it is very possible that they exist, they just cannot be seen next to such a giant). But Betelgeuse is so huge that its diameter was measured “directly”, i.e. using an interferometer - this operation could be applied to a very small number of stars, and Betelgeuse was the first.
Betelgeuse's mass exceeds the Sun by about 15 times (from 10 to 20 - measuring the mass of a single star is generally the aerobatics of astrometry, more precisely it has not yet been possible). How can it be that the diameter is a thousand times larger, which means the volume is a billion times larger, but the mass is only 15 times larger, what is the density there? And here it is. And if we take into account that the core of the star is much denser than its outer layers, then the outer layers of Betelgeuse are much rarer than anything that we can imagine, except for interstellar space, into which Betelgeuse, like almost every star, transitions very gradually, i.e. It is impossible to determine exactly where a star ends and interstellar space begins. But nevertheless, fifteen solar masses is quite a lot for a star. Only 120 known stars are heavier than Betelgeuse.
How many times is Betelgeuse brighter than the Sun? One hundred thirty-five thousand times! True, this is taking into account infrared radiation, and in visible light it is about a hundred thousand times. That is, if you mentally placed Betelgeuse and the Sun at the same distance, Betelgeuse would be a hundred thousand times brighter than the Sun. On the list of the most powerful known stars, Betelgeuse ranks approximately twenty-fifth (roughly because the exact brightness of many hypergiants is not precisely known). If Betelgeuse were placed at the standard distance of ten parsecs from Earth (about 32 light years), it would be visible during the day, but at night objects would cast shadows in its light. But it’s better not to put it there, because the radiation of a supergiant is the kind of thing that it’s better for living beings to look at from afar. It seems that the absence of nearby supergiants (of any color) is one of the conditions for life on Earth.
The surface temperature of Betelgeuse is three and a half thousand kelvins (well, ordinary degrees are also close to that). This is not much for a star; Our Sun has a surface temperature of 5700 K, that is, twice as hot. That is, Betelgeuse is a “cold” star, one of the coldest known stars. The temperature of a star determines its color, or rather the shade of its glow. Those mysterious people who manage to see stars in color clearly define the color of Betelgeuse as distinctly reddish (see epigraph). That's why Betelgeuse is called a red supergiant. You shouldn’t think that it’s really bright red, like a poppy: rather, its surface is yellowish-orange.

Presumably, this is what the surface of Betelgeuse looks like.

I mentioned above that the apparent diameter of Betelgeuse is from 0.056 to 0.059 arcseconds. This scatter is not due to measurement inaccuracy. And because the body of the star itself pulsates with an approximate period of several years, changing both size and brightness. It would be logical to assume that as the size of the star decreases, the brightness of the star will also decrease, but in fact, everything happens exactly the opposite: at its minimum size, Betelgeuse acquires maximum brightness. At its maximum brightness, Betelgeuse turns out to be brighter than Rigel, whose magnitude is 0.18, that is, the brightest star in the constellation. Therefore, in terms of its brilliance, Betelgeuse has the right to be designated Alpha Orion.
This in itself is not surprising: the heating of a star during compression is a commonplace in astrophysics (occurs due to the transition of gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy, who knows the wording more precisely, correct me). But why does Betelgeuse pulsate like that? What exactly are the processes going on inside her? Nobody knows this.
The brief youth of a giant star
Remember when we talked about how young Sirius is - only 250 million years old? So, Betelgeuse is a small child compared to Sirius: it is only 10 million years old! When it caught fire, dinosaurs had long since become extinct on Earth, mammals had already occupied a dominant position on land, the continents had almost taken their current shape, and the youngest mountain systems were being built (including the Himalayas). Realize that the Ural Mountains are much older than Betelgeuse!
But unlike Sirius, which is unclear where it came from, it is very clear where Betelgeuse came from.
Orion is a unique constellation: the stars in it are not only visible to our eyes, but in reality they are quite close to each other in space. And they are close in age too. The fact is that most of Orion is occupied by a giant nebula - the Molecular Cloud of Orion, in which intense star formation processes take place (that is, it is a “stellar cradle”, and almost the closest to Earth). Young stars fly away from this nebula in all directions. Orion consists of these young, hot blue stars, exemplary peers, who have flown relatively close from their place of birth.
But if all the other stars in Orion are hot to the point of blue (which is typical for young stars), then why is Betelgeuse red?
Because it's very big.
The lifespan of a star is determined by how long it takes for hydrogen in the star’s core to completely transform into helium (people, should I write an educational program about why stars burn?) It would seem that the larger and heavier the star, the more hydrogen it contains, and the longer it should burn. But here again the opposite is true: the larger and heavier the star, the higher the temperature in its core and the faster the thermonuclear reaction occurs there. Since Betelgeuse was born heavier and larger than its peers Rigel, Bellatrix and other Orion stars, the hydrogen in its core burned faster and burned out in just a few million years. And after the hydrogen in the core burns out, the star enters its dying stage - transformation into a red giant. In the case of Betelgeuse, it turned into a red supergiant.
That is, despite the fact that Betelgeuse is one of the youngest stars in the Universe in terms of age, it is already on the verge of death. Alas, large hot stars live very short lives, ending their stormy lives in just a few million years. There are several other red hypergiants known that have entered the last phase of their development, but they are all very far from us. Therefore, Betelgeuse provides a unique, albeit sad, opportunity to study the last phase of a star's life from a relatively close distance.
It is known that over the past 15 years, Betelgeuse has shrunk in diameter by 15 percent. This is a constant contraction that is not associated with pulsations. Mathematical models of stars say that such a reduction in size is also a sign that the end of a star’s evolution is approaching.
What's next for Betelgeuse? This is not peaceful Sirius-Main, now Sirius B, which simply quietly shed its scarlet shells and turned into a white dwarf. Betelgeuse's mass is so great that it will shed its shells in one of the grandest explosions known to the Universe - in a Supernova explosion.
And this will be the closest Supernova to the Earth, possibly in the entire existence of the Earth. Precisely because there is not and never was a single supergiant: supergiants are doomed to end their evolution in Supernova explosions, the remnants of Supernovae are characteristic and easily identified, and so there is not a single one nearby.
When it will be? Betelgeuse will explode within the next millennium. Maybe tomorrow.
How will it look like? Instead of a shining point, a disk of dazzling brightness will appear in the sky, which will be visible during the day, and at night you can read by its light. This disk will slowly dim, and the night sky will likely return to normal within a few months. In place of Betelgeuse, an amazingly beautiful nebula will appear, which will be visible to the naked eye for several years. Then nothing will be visible.
What will remain of Betelgeuse? No, not a white dwarf - it's too heavy for that. What will remain is a neutron star (pulsar) or a black hole.
How will this affect life on Earth? Most likely not at all. Betelgeuse is far enough from Earth that the hard radiation from the Supernova explosion will be scattered in space before reaching the Solar System, and what will reach will be reflected by the solar magnetosphere. Only if Betelgeuse’s rotation axis were directed directly towards the Earth, then hard gamma radiation would painfully hit the biosphere. But we know from Hubble photographs that Betelgeuse's rotation axis is away from the Earth. So it will be possible to admire the heavenly fireworks from Earth completely safely.
The same fate awaits Rigel, Bellatrix and the other bright stars of Orion over the next tens of millions of years. Before becoming a red supergiant, Betelgeuse was apparently a hot blue star like them. They will be replaced by young stars, still hidden from us in the depths of the Orion Molecular Cloud.
So go and see Betelgeuse while it's still shining. Heaven is not unchanging.

Largest visible star

On the right shoulder of Orion, in the crown of the Winter Hexagon, the beautiful Betelgeuse shines in the winter skies.

Orion constellation. Betelgeuse is a reddish-orange star in the upper left corner of the constellation.

This star is not called Alpha Orionis for nothing, although dazzling bluish Rigel - in the photo in the lower right corner - is brighter most of the time. Betelgeuse is a unique star in many respects, which astronomers have been studying for many years and discovering more and more interesting facts.

First, Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars in the Universe. Its diameter is about a thousand times greater than the diameter of the Sun. Even the largest known star, VY Canis Majoris, is only twice the diameter of Betelgeuse (and therefore eight times the volume). So it’s not for nothing that this star bears the proud title of a red supergiant.

If it were in the place of the Sun, it would almost fill the orbit of Saturn:

Only eight known stars (all red hypergiants) are larger in volume than Betelgeuse, but all of them appear very dim in Earth's sky. The reason is simple: Betelgeuse is much closer than all of them.

Betelgeuse is 640 light years away, and on a galactic scale this is very small. Betelgeuse is the closest supergiant to us.

An interesting conclusion follows from this: Betelgeuse in the earth's sky has the largest apparent diameter of all stars (of course, after the Sun.)

It is clear that everything that is smaller in diameter than a minute of arc is perceived by the human eye as a point. The angular diameters of absolutely all stars (except the Sun) are less than an arc minute, so they all look like points. In fact, of course, all their angular diameters are different. Betelgeuse's angular diameter was first determined in 1920 to be 0.047 arcseconds, which was the largest angular diameter of a star then known. Since then, however, the star R Dorado, invisible in the northern hemisphere, was discovered, the angular diameter of which turned out to be 0.057 arcseconds. But even in the southern hemisphere it is almost invisible: at maximum brightness it is hardly visible to the naked eye, and at minimum it cannot be seen in every telescope. R Dorado is so cold that it emits mostly infrared radiation. But since then, the angular measurements have been refined, and for Betelgeuse the apparent diameter is determined to be from 0.056 to 0.059 arcseconds, which restores its lost position as the largest visible star. It's not so easy to oust the queen of the winter skies!

Not surprisingly, Betelgeuse was the first star for which photographs of its disk were obtained. That is, in which the star looked not like a point, but like a disk. (The fact that the bright stars appear as disks in the above photograph is a convention of the image, which can only convey differences in brightness through differences in size.) The photograph was taken by the Hubble Orbital Telescope in 1995.

Here is this historical image in ultraviolet light (NASA/ESA credit):

It is clear that the colors in the photograph are relative: the redder, the colder. A bright spot near the center of the star is considered one of its poles, that is, Betelgeuse’s rotation axis is directed almost towards us, but slightly to the side.

More recently, namely in July last year (2009), new photographs of Betelgeuse were taken at the ground-based Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. Here is one of them:

The resulting photos show that Betelgeuse has a tail. This tail extends six radii of Betelgeuse itself (comparable to the distance from the Sun to Neptune). What kind of tail this is, why it is there and what it means, scientists themselves do not yet know, although there are many assumptions.

Measuring Betelgeuse

It is interesting to give the main parameters of Betelgeuse. We will see that by almost all parameters, Betelgeuse turns out to be one of the “winners” of the known Universe.

In diameter, as already mentioned, Betelgeuse is about a thousand times larger than the Sun. It is very difficult to accurately determine the diameter and distance from the Sun of a single star, and Betelgeuse has no satellites (although it is very possible that they exist, they just cannot be seen next to such a giant). But Betelgeuse is so huge that its diameter was measured “directly”, i.e. using an interferometer - this operation could be applied to a very small number of stars, and Betelgeuse was the first.

Betelgeuse's mass exceeds the Sun by about 15 times (from 10 to 20 - measuring the mass of a single star is generally the aerobatics of astrometry, more precisely it has not yet been possible). How can it be that the diameter is a thousand times larger, which means the volume is a billion times larger, but the mass is only 15 times larger, what is the density there? And here it is. And if we take into account that the core of the star is much denser than its outer layers, then the outer layers of Betelgeuse are much rarer than anything that we can imagine, except for interstellar space, into which Betelgeuse, like almost every star, transitions very gradually, i.e. It is impossible to determine exactly where a star ends and interstellar space begins. But nevertheless, fifteen solar masses is quite a lot for a star. Only 120 known stars are heavier than Betelgeuse.

How many times is Betelgeuse brighter than the Sun? One hundred thirty-five thousand times! True, this is taking into account infrared radiation, and in visible light it is about a hundred thousand times. That is, if you mentally placed Betelgeuse and the Sun at the same distance, Betelgeuse would be a hundred thousand times brighter than the Sun. On the list of the most powerful known stars, Betelgeuse ranks approximately twenty-fifth (roughly because the exact brightness of many hypergiants is not precisely known). If Betelgeuse were placed at the standard distance of ten parsecs from Earth (about 32 light years), it would be visible during the day, but at night objects would cast shadows in its light. But it’s better not to put it there, because the radiation of a supergiant is the kind of thing that it’s better for living beings to look at from afar. It seems that the absence of nearby supergiants (of any color) is one of the conditions for life on Earth.

The surface temperature of Betelgeuse is three and a half thousand kelvins (well, ordinary degrees are also close to that). This is not much for a star; Our Sun has a surface temperature of 5700 K, that is, twice as hot. That is, Betelgeuse is a “cold” star, one of the coldest known stars. The temperature of a star determines its color, or rather the shade of its glow. Those mysterious people who manage to see stars in color clearly define the color of Betelgeuse as distinctly reddish (see epigraph). That's why Betelgeuse is called a red supergiant. You shouldn’t think that it’s really bright red, like a poppy: rather, its surface is yellowish-orange.

Presumably, this is what the surface of Betelgeuse looks like.

I mentioned above that the apparent diameter of Betelgeuse is from 0.056 to 0.059 arcseconds. This scatter is not due to measurement inaccuracy. And because the body of the star itself pulsates with an approximate period of several years, changing both size and brightness. It would be logical to assume that as the size of the star decreases, the brightness of the star will also decrease, but in fact, everything happens exactly the opposite: at its minimum size, Betelgeuse acquires maximum brightness. At its maximum brightness, Betelgeuse turns out to be brighter than Rigel, whose magnitude is 0.18, that is, the brightest star in the constellation. Therefore, in terms of its brilliance, Betelgeuse has the right to be designated Alpha Orion.

This in itself is not surprising: the heating of a star during compression is a commonplace in astrophysics (occurs due to the transition of gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy, who knows the wording more precisely, correct me). But why does Betelgeuse pulsate like that? What exactly are the processes going on inside her? Nobody knows this.

The brief youth of a giant star

Remember when we talked about how young Sirius is - only 250 million years old? So, Betelgeuse is a small child compared to Sirius: it is only 10 million years old! When it caught fire, dinosaurs had long since become extinct on Earth, mammals had already occupied a dominant position on land, the continents had almost taken their current shape, and the youngest mountain systems were being built (including the Himalayas). Realize that the Ural Mountains are much older than Betelgeuse!

But unlike Sirius, which is unclear where it came from, it is very clear where Betelgeuse came from.

Orion is a unique constellation: the stars in it are not only visible to our eyes, but in reality they are quite close to each other in space. And they are close in age too. The fact is that most of Orion is occupied by a giant nebula - the Molecular Cloud of Orion, in which intense star formation processes take place (that is, it is a “stellar cradle”, and almost the closest to Earth). Young stars fly away from this nebula in all directions. Orion consists of these young, hot blue stars, exemplary peers, who have flown relatively close from their place of birth.

But if all the other stars in Orion are hot to the point of blue (which is typical for young stars), then why is Betelgeuse red?

Because it's very big.

The lifetime of a star is determined by how long it takes for the star's core to completely convert hydrogen into helium. (people, should I write an educational program about why the stars burn?) It would seem that the larger and heavier the star, the more hydrogen it contains, and the longer it should burn. But here again the opposite is true: the larger and heavier the star, the higher the temperature in its core and the faster the thermonuclear reaction occurs there. Since Betelgeuse was born heavier and larger than its peers Rigel, Bellatrix and other Orion stars, the hydrogen in its core burned faster and burned out in just a few million years. And after the hydrogen in the core burns out, the star enters its dying stage - transformation into a red giant. In the case of Betelgeuse, it turned into a red supergiant.

That is, despite the fact that Betelgeuse is one of the youngest stars in the Universe in terms of age, it is already on the verge of death. Alas, large hot stars live very short lives, ending their stormy lives in just a few million years. There are several other red hypergiants known that have entered the last phase of their development, but they are all very far from us. Therefore, Betelgeuse provides a unique, albeit sad, opportunity to study the last phase of a star's life from a relatively close distance.

It is known that over the past 15 years, Betelgeuse has shrunk in diameter by 15 percent. This is a constant contraction that is not associated with pulsations. Mathematical models of stars say that such a reduction in size is also a sign that the end of a star’s evolution is approaching.

What's next for Betelgeuse? This is not peaceful Sirius-Main, now Sirius B, which simply quietly shed its scarlet shells and turned into a white dwarf. Betelgeuse's mass is so great that it will shed its shells in one of the grandest explosions known to the Universe - in a Supernova explosion.

And this will be the closest Supernova to the Earth, possibly in the entire existence of the Earth. Precisely because there is not and never was a single supergiant: supergiants are doomed to end their evolution in Supernova explosions, the remnants of Supernovae are characteristic and easily identified, and so there is not a single one nearby.

When it will be? Betelgeuse will explode within the next millennium. Maybe tomorrow.

How will it look like? Instead of a shining point, a disk of dazzling brightness will appear in the sky, which will be visible during the day, and at night you can read by its light. This disk will slowly dim, and the night sky will likely return to normal within a few months. In place of Betelgeuse, an amazingly beautiful nebula will appear, which will be visible to the naked eye for several years. Then nothing will be visible.

What will remain of Betelgeuse? No, not a white dwarf - it's too heavy for that. What will remain is a neutron star (pulsar) or a black hole.

How will this affect life on Earth? Most likely not at all. Betelgeuse is far enough from Earth that the hard radiation from the Supernova explosion will be scattered in space before reaching the Solar System, and what will reach will be reflected by the solar magnetosphere. Only if Betelgeuse’s rotation axis were directed directly towards the Earth, then hard gamma radiation would painfully hit the biosphere. But we know from Hubble photographs that Betelgeuse's rotation axis is away from the Earth. So it will be possible to admire the heavenly fireworks from Earth completely safely.

The same fate awaits Rigel, Bellatrix and the other bright stars of Orion over the next tens of millions of years. Before becoming a red supergiant, Betelgeuse was apparently a hot blue star like them. They will be replaced by young stars, still hidden from us in the depths of the Orion Molecular Cloud.

Other photos of the star can be found.