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The Mystery of Betelgeuse's Dimming Has Finally Been Solved - WIRED

The Mystery of Betelgeuse's Dimming Has Finally Been Solved - WIRED

The Mystery of Betelgeuse's Dimming Has Finally Been Solved - WIRED
Jun 18, 2021 1 min, 22 secs

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In December 2019, astronomers noticed a strange, dramatic dimming in the light from Betelgeuse, a bright red star in the Orion constellation.

Several months later, they had narrowed the most likely explanations to two: a short-lived cold patch on the star's southern surface (akin to a sun spot), or a clump of dust making the star seem dimmer to observers on Earth.

Over time, the star cycles through periods when its surface expands and then contracts.

While they're easy to track with ground-based telescopes, these shifts don't cause the sort of radical changes in the star's light that would account for the changes seen during the dimming event.

Telescopes pointed at the giant were able to determine that—rather than a tidy, uniform drop in luminance—Betelgeuse's dimming was unevenly distributed, giving the star an odd, squished shape when viewed from Earth.

Combined with some timely ground observations, this UV data indicated that a big burp that formed a cloud of dust near the star may have caused the star to get darker.

"With Hubble, we could see the material as it left the star's surface and moved out through the atmosphere, before the dust formed that caused the star to appear to dim," said Andrea Dupree, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who made those observations.

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