What’s your favorite star? Is it Betelgeuse, on Orion’s right shoulder? (His right, your left.)
Well, if it is, I have good news: the ALMA telescope in Chile has taken a nice, clear picture of it.
Spoiler alert: it’s not perfectly round.
I thought Betelgeuse was Orion’s right armpit, but the Ghost With The Most may have colored my perception (as in, he’s notoriously stinky).
When I saw the title with the name repeated three times I thought of this star:
Blah! Here I come, babe!
There have been several pictures of Betelgeuse over the years (although the purported first image turned out not to be, really).
It isn’t appreciated, but Betelgeuse is actually a variable star. One bunch that doesn’t appreciate (or at least, they didn’t until recent years – they may have cleaned their act up recently) was the Encyclopedia Britannica, which has stated in print that Betelgeuse isn’t variable. This comes as news to the folks at the American Association of Variable Star observers, who have a century of records of its variation. They’ve gone as far as doing Fourier analysis on it. Betelgeuse actually has six different frequencies in its variation.
Sir William Herschel was the first to discover its variability*. Twice. He forgot that he had discovered its variability while in South Africa, then analyzed his results, and discovered it again.
*There’s actually evidence that others may have discovered it earlier, but it’s ambiguous.
What the heck does this mean:
Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars currently known – with a radius around 1400 times larger than the Sun’s in the millimeter continuum.
The millimeter continuum? Did those four words at the end get transplanted from a different sentence?
ALMA is a radio telescope array observing in radio frequencies between micrometer wavelengths up to 10 mm. This is the radius as observed in wavelengths of (presumably) several millimeters. The word “spectrum” might have been better than “continuum” here.
No idea, but check out this article, especially the graphics on the right showing the size of various stars.
It’s like the Powers Of Ten! There are some ginormous stars out there.
My favorite Galilean moon is, obviously, Io.
i don’t really have a favorite star, but I feel closest to Alpha Centauri.
I’m a Deneb man myself. Go out and take a look at it tonight. It’s the star at the top of the Cygnus cross. Marvel at the fact that the starlight you are seeing left its star over 2600 years ago.
Your agonizer, please.
Well, that would only be Proxima correct.
Sol-ly you two can’t be serious?
Back to the OP, one of of my undergrad professors did most of his work on studying Betelgeuse (mostly via photometry, i.e., by measuring the variability). I’m curious what he’d say are the implications of this result. I’m guessing not much, in that it mostly just confirms things we’d already strongly suspected. It does make for a nice proof-of-concept for demonstrating a telescope system, though.
I have a particular fondness for VY Canis Major, just because size matters. There are bigger, but not by much. Relatively, anyway. A few thousand extra miles of radius can be a ridiculously large volume/mass.
Meanwhile, I need to go call up Ford and Zaphod and tell them to get their families the hell out of there.
I once knew a girl who fell in love with a space alien from the constellation Aquila. The couple were going there to be married. But unfortunately, she got left at the Altair.
Known to the ancients as a variable star. First eclipsing binary found. Actually known to be a eclipsing ternary now.
Came less than 10 lightyears from us a few million years ago. Was brighter than Sirius then.
Somehow developed a bad rep. Hence the name “The Ghoul”. (Or “The Head of the Ghoul” in full.)
Later the name of a pioneering programming language.
I personally think that the ancients knew it was a variable star (it’s the premise of part of my book), but the orthodox view is that it was only discovered to be so in 1783, when John Goodricke and Johann Georg Palitzsch published articles on their observations in the Journal of the Royal Society. In fact, they were adjacent articles. The two didn’t know each other.
Algol is, indeed, a set of three stars, but the third doesn’t eclipse either of the other two, at least from our perspective. we are almost in the plane the first two co-orbit in, but not quite, so they don’t perfectly eclipse each other.
And a Batman villain…