From the “No. we aren’t talking about cloning Michael Keaton or saying Betelgeuse! Betelgeuse!” department comes this very interesting discovery that took a century to confirm.
Astronomers find strongest evidence yet that Betelgeuse has a companion
“The conclusion of a century-long quest”
At long last, astronomers have firm evidence that Betelgeuse, one of the most famous stars in the night sky, is not alone. Using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT), a team led by French researcher Miguel Montargès obtained the clearest image ever of what likely is Betelgeuse B, the star orbiting Betelgeuse. “This is the conclusion of a century-long quest,” says Montargès.
“We have shown that Betelgeuse is not single, it is accompanied by a faint stellar companion,” says Montargès, astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris – PSL, France, and lead author of the study published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. Betelgeuse, a reddish star in the Orion constellation that is easily visible with the naked eye and is known to change in brightness, has been observed for millennia. But it still surprises astronomers.
“I jumped from my chair when I saw the processed images,” recalls Montargès. Astronomers have looked for the potential companion, originally proposed to explain Betelgeuse’s brightness changes, for about a century, but without success. Two studies published in 2024 robustly predicted that in December that year, the companion would be furthest from Betelgeuse and hence easier to spot. Montargès and his team got to work, observing the star with ESO’s VLT in December 2024 and spending several months processing the data.
“Honestly, I thought we did not have the sensitivity to detect Betelgeuse B as it was predicted,” explains Montargès. “Because it is more massive than predicted, we see it!” Originally thought to be about as massive as the Sun, the new observations reveal that Betelgeuse B has instead around two to three times the mass of the Sun. “The fact that we can still discover a nearby companion, more massive and brighter than the Sun, around such a well-studied star is remarkable,” says Montargès. “These are among the best moments in science: seeing something new, unexpected.”
Betelgeuse B was directly imaged, meaning the light from the star itself was detected, using the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s VLT in Chile’s Atacama Desert. While there was evidence for the existence of this companion star, including a possible direct detection with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaiʻi, USA, this is the strongest evidence for, and clearest image yet of, Betelgeuse B. “It is remarkable to see how SPHERE and advanced post-processing techniques, originally developed to find exoplanets, also excel at detecting a companion around a massive, evolved star like Betelgeuse,“ says co-author Anthony Boccaletti, also an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris.
“To be certain that the companion is really there, we still need to observe it in one year on the other side of the star, but there is very little space left for doubt,” adds Montargès.
A few years back, Betelgeuse was the subject of attention from astronomers and non-astronomers alike when it visibly started dimming. As an evolved supergiant star, Betelgeuse is expected to die in a supernova explosion, and the dimming led some to speculate it could be about to explode. A group of astronomers led by Montargès studied the star with ESO’s VLT, finding it was instead obscured by a cloud of dust.
The potential detection of Betelgeuse B will prompt astronomers to investigate how the companion could affect Betelgeuse’s anticipated supernova explosion. “The question is truly opened whether this companion is going to have an impact on the evolution of the red supergiant,” concludes Montargès.
More information
This research was presented in a paper titled “VLT/SPHERE images the candidate companion of Betelgeuse” to appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
make it a news when there are THREE 😅
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse… 🙂
And no, it’s not pronounced “Beetlejuice”.
What is the correct pronunciation?
beh-tell-szuhz
LINK
This isn’t that surprising as double stars are more common than you realize as Antares, Sirius, Castor are all part of having one of more companions even our Sun had a suspected companion star long ago, now it is over 180 light years away LINK
Castor is composed of 6 stars. Regulus has a 3-star dance. Polaris is also composed of 3 stars. Capella is a multiple star system. Vega is a 2-star system. Spica is a close Binary. Altair is a 3-star system.
There are many more.
Sol is clearly
A lone stellar cat
An asexual gasbag
etc
Zaphod and Ford never mentioned it.
After Mr Prefect turned black in 2004 it was only a matter of time
Beetlegeuse would start to identify as 2 soul.
A new entry for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
No, such is probably unwarranted as there is no known hyperspace route that passes close to the Betelgeuse star system.
However, it may deserve an “honorable mention” as Ford Prefect comes from a small planet in the vicinity of binary Betelgeuse.
It’s on the Vogon’s build list
Darn . . . I did indeed forget to look at that in the last 10 years or so! Thanks for letting me know.
You know, since I was born less than a century ago, hardly a day has gone by where I haven’t asked myself: “I wonder if the “star” Betelgeuse is actual a binary system?”
Scientific knowledge is important, but this is an “Oh-so-special issue” in astronomy. I am so relieved to get this update, stated to be “very interesting”, “remarkable”, “surprising” and “unexpected”.
/sarc
since July 2007, hardly a day has ever gone by without thinking about what a load of crap carbon dioxide accused of causing global warming is
made your day! 🙂
Not really, but I am quite surprised by the number of WUWT readers that apparently don’t recognize what a “/sarc” tag means.
And some of us don’t need to actually enter a sarc tag, as most will understand that. 🙂
If Betelgeuse is binary, is it also trans? What are its pronouns? They/them?
Better check the spectra for testosterone. 😉
That’s would make a lot of unusual behavior the past few years a lot more explainable. Curious to see if this holds up.
I, myself, happen to prefer Ursa Minor Beta. Why?
It is a West Zone planet which by an inexplicable and somewhat suspicious freak of topography consists almost entirely of sub- tropical coastline. By an equally suspicious freak of temporal relativism, it is nearly always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close.
As usual, the Devil’s in the details.
Forgive me for my digression from science to humor, but did the catastrophic anthropogenic climate change cause this….. too?
A few years back, amid the time CAGW was changed to “Climate Change”, and amid manmade global warming hype, observations of receding Martian polar ice caps was concurrently being recognized. One would expect that our ignorant media, e.g. “Fauci is a master of science”, would also blame mankind for vaporizing Martian CO2. see: https://science.nasa.gov/resource/the-changing-ice-cap-of-mars/ <– Fortunately, the media are specifically clued in this article that, “In contrast to shrinking ice caps on Earth, climate change is not to blame on Mars“.
One version I heard was Fauci declaring, “I am the science.”
Not quite. He declared that attacking him was attacking science.
Blindingly obviously, if the Martian polar icecaps have been receding for many years then it is caused by climate change. Martian climate change, that is.
We need to reclaim our language from the Orwellites who distort it in order to exploit it. “Climate change” means a change in climate. Period
OK, then.
No, Sparta Nova 4, but according to the mainstream media Donald Trump did cause the extinction of the dinosaurs.
*coffee spew*
Thanks for that laugh.
so that’s what covfefe is…
According to the first episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 4, the Enterprise went 65 million years back in time while investigating a strange stellar storm with an emergency beacon signal coming from it. A Martian ship tried claiming the mostly disabled Enterprise as salvage but Pike and friends convinced the Martian captain to not do that. The Martians wanted weapons to defeat the invasive insectoid species from the 5th planet, so they stole Enterprise’s primary antimatter containment and lobbed it at the 5th planet, destroying it. Enterprise was able to use energy from that explosion to time travel back to their present.
Spock ran calculations which showed the loss of the 5th planet, which became the asteroid belt, cause Mars to move farther from the Sun and become uninhabitable. Simulations also determined that a large chunk of the planet was the Chicxulub asteroid.
The stellar storm they were observing was caused by the antimatter destruction of Sol’s fifth planet, and the distress beacon that led them to enter the storm and end up 65 million years in the past was the beacon they launched from Enterprise.
Therefore, humanity is responsible for its own creation, exterminating dinosaurs and lots of other life on Earth, and the ultimate demise of the Martians, though they must have evacuated by sublight ships because traces of their DNA (thanks to Dr M’benga’s scans of some of them) were now known to be found in several species near the Solar system.
Time loop story that ties up all its own loose ends.
“As an evolved supergiant star, Betelgeuse is expected to die in a supernova explosion, and the dimming led some to speculate it could be about to explode.”
The thing about space…it’s really big. Betelgeuse could explode tonight but we wouldn’t know about for 500 or 600 years. Heck, it could have gone supernova during the revolutionary war and we wouldn’t find out for another 250 to 350 years…assuming humanity is still around that long.
The other thing about astronomical events…they’re on really long time scales. “about to explode” could mean in the next ten minutes, or it could mean 100000 years from now. We’re talking about a star with a lifecycle of tens of millions of years. “Soon” is a pretty subjective measure.
Would the gravity wave caused by the supernova get here before light from the exploded star?
The arrival of Betelgeusian refugees, all fighting age males (or whatever passes for male on Betelgeuse 3) would happen within a week, so we’d know a lot sooner.
And I should care about this…..why?
This is a landmark event in science. The scientific method has been formally re-defined to be a consensus process. Now, we have one observation overturning the status quo, the way science used to work. With a bit of effort we may be able to get science back on track using this Betelgeuse discovery as a reference. Be very excited. This could be the start of a new era of human progress and scientific discovery.
Well, you did ask.
I see what you did there.
So is Betelgeuse going to explode soon or not? If the companion is the cause of the brightening and dimming of Betelgeuse, then Betelgeuse may be more stable than assumed if the brightening and dimming are not coming from Betelgeuse itself.
Astronomy is such fun. There’s something new every day.
And bigger and better telescopes will be coming on line in the near future.
What we need are IR, visible, UV, X-Ray, and radio telescopes sin orbits scattered across the solar system to do long baseline and synthetic aperture observations. They’d all need to be coordinated by LASER relays to carry the programming to get them all aimed in the same direction. That would also drastically speed up getting data back to Earth by doing a LASER bucket brigade hopping from one telescope to another, and using multiple paths to boost the bandwidth. Relying on radio that spreads out to where only a few watts of power makes it back here would make such an observation system impossible to actually use. Some of the solar orbit satellites should be mainly data relays. They could have small optical telescopes and radio receivers to do local observations. Could park some around every planet, moon, and the larger asteroids, or even *on* some of them.
With the estimated final cost of $10 billion USD for designing, manufacturing and putting the James Webb Space Telescope into final orbit and fully functioning, and then considering the USA has a current national debt rapidly approaching $40 TRILLION USD, I’m inclined to think it will be a very long time before a “bigger and better telescope” comes on line.