Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! The famous star with the cool name has a big announcement: it has a sibling! For the first time, astronomers have captured a photo showing a smaller star next to the iconic red supergiant we all know and love.
That Betelgeuse has a companion is not a major shock for astronomers. For the last century, scientists have predicted that the giant star might be part of a double star system – a binary system – but we couldn’t know for sure. For a long time, our technology wasn’t sensitive enough to see faint stars right next to something as bright as Betelgeuse.
Until now, that is. The power of telescopes has seriously improved in the last 100 years. A team of astronomers used ESO’s Very Large Telescope to finally find Betelgeuse’s companion star, but even they were surprised. Originally, the team thought the companion star was about the size of our Sun, and that the VLT was not quite sensitive enough to see it. So, when they saw the image of the second star, they were astonished. It turns out that Betelgeuse’s stellar sibling is 2-3 times more massive than the Sun: just bright enough to be visible through the telescope!
Betelgeuse is at a late stage of its life, and because of its size, it will eventually die as a supernova. When this happens, it will be so bright that we will see it from Earth during the daytime. Now that we know about the companion star, astronomers are wondering about how this will affect the supernova: Will Betelgeuse explode sooner than we might have expected, or will this push the date of the supernova further down the road?
This discovery shows off the amazing science that astronomers can do with modern, powerful telescopes. Even though Betelgeuse has been observed for millennia and studied more than any other star of its kind, we can still learn more about it. As the lead astronomer in the team, Miguel Montargès said, “in 2026, we can still discover new properties of a star that has been observed since the dawn of humanity”.
(Space Scoop)
