Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse in Photos

Betelgeuse is experiencing it's ten minutes of fame on Earth, and we're not talking about the man in the striped suit. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star on the right shoulder of the Orion constellation, and it's one of the brightest stars in the sky. But that's not why it's famous right now. About 700 years ago, the star began to grow dimmer, and the lack of it's light is just beginning to reach Earth. It could be a star that grows brighter and darker over time, or it could be that the star is about to explode. When we say "about", it could be in one year of 10,000 years. So don't get alarmed. Just enjoy these cool pictures of it instead.

This article first appeared on Wired.

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Betelgeuse isn't a scary man in a suit, and it isn't a smooth round sphere like our Sun. It's more like a blob of hot lava that churns around in space. It's a lot larger than our Sun too, with a radius 1,400 times larger. This photo is the first image taken of the surface of Betelgeuse, and it was taken by the ALMA telescope in Chile. It looks more like an egg yolk than a star to us.
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Betelgeuse is a naturally bright star, even against it's backdrop of stars. But if Betelgeuse goes boom like it will eventually, in a massive supernova, we can expect it to get a lot brighter. We're talking so bright that we'll be able to see it from Earth in the daytime. It already expels material into space, but in the event of a supernova, this photo would be full of fireworks and light.
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This photo was taken by European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and shows how blob-like the Betelgeuse really is. For scale, the small red disk in the center is four and a half sizes larger than the Earth's orbit. Betelgeuse ain't small.
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This image of Betelgeuse shows it's bow shock, which all the material that has been pushed out of the star. The wall of red light to the left is lots of dust that has collected due to a separate magnetic field. Scientists guess that one day the bow shock will collide with this wall of dust, but don't worry. We won't be around to see it.
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This is the Orion constellation (the Hunter). It's probably the most well-known constellation in our sky. To the bottom of it is the Orion Nebula (pictured above), and 1,450 light years away sits one of the closest star-forming regions to Earth in our local area. Betelgeuse sits on the right side of the Orion constellation.