Betelgeuse is a red supergiant of spectral type M1-2. It is 548 light-years from the Sun, with an absolute magnitude of about −6. Less than 10 million years old, it is expected to end its evolution with a supernova explosion, most likely within 100,000 years.
About Betelgeuse in brief
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant of spectral type M1-2. It is 548 light-years from the Sun, with an absolute magnitude of about −6. Less than 10 million years old, it is expected to end its evolution with a supernova explosion, most likely within 100,000 years. Its Bayer designation is α Orionis, Latinised to Alpha Orionis and abbreviated Alpha Ori or α Ori. Starting in October 2019, Betelgeused began to dim noticeably, and by mid-February 2020 its brightness had dropped by a factor of approximately 3, from magnitude 0. 5 to 1. 7. In 2016, the International Astronomical Union organized a Working Group on Star Names to catalog and standardize proper names for stars. The WGSN’s first bulletin of July 2016 included a table of two batches of star names approved by the W GSN, which included Betel geuse. It’s the first star to be included in the IAU Catalog of Star Names, which is now in its third year. The traditional name Betel Geuse is derived from either the Arabic “the armpit of Orion” or “the hand of Orion.” In English, there are four common pronunciations of this name, depending on whether the first e is pronounced short or long and whether the s is pronounced s. The last pronunciation has been popularized for sounding like “beetle juice”. By Chinese astronomers, Betlegeuse was observed as having a yellow contrast before the nineteenth century, before modern astronomers observed it as a “pleto’”, Latin for “rubedo’s rubiness’, or “ruddiness,” a term used to describe the color of stars before the term ‘plemy’ was coined.
It was also called “Pleto III” by the Italian astronomer Angelo Secchi, who used it to refer to his prototypes for his Class III stellar classification systems, Secchi III, Pleto II, and Ptolemy III, before the modern term was used for the Class III stars. It has been observed moving through the interstellar medium at a speed of 30 kms, creating a bow shock over four light- years wide. The Earth-observed angular diameter of BetelGeuse is exceeded only by those of R Doradus and the Sun. Its apparent magnitude, varying between +0. 0 and +1. 6, has the widest range displayed by any first-magnitude star, at near-infrared wavelengths, is the brightest star in the night sky. If it were at the center of our Solar System, its surface would lie beyond the asteroid belt and it would engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and possibly Jupiter. The star’s mass range from slightly under ten to a little over twenty times that of the Sun; it is also surrounded by a complex, asymmetric envelope roughly 250 times the size of the star.
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This page is based on the article Betelgeuse published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 22, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
