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Orion with Betelgeuse emphasized Modified from an image by Pixabay / sl1990 |
Astronomers are puzzled by the dimming of one of the brightest stars in the sky, Betelgeuse in Orion.If you've taken a shine to the article, you can read the rest at "What’s Happening at Betelgeuse?" You may also want to see Dr. Faulkner's article, "Betelgeuse: Supernova or Fading Star?"
Amateur astronomers quickly learn to identify Betelgeuse, the right shoulder in the constellation Orion. After getting over the initial chuckle that a star could be named beetle-juice (more accurately, betel-jooz, an Arabic name also amusing, meaning ‘armpit of Orion’), the new astronomer learns it is a red giant star 650 light-years away. Astrophysics students learn that red giants are fated to blow up as supernovas, according to stellar evolution theory. They learn the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram that astronomers use to connect the dots between star types, showing how one type evolves into another over billions of years. The diagram was not made for stellar evolution theory, though; it was merely a diagram to conveniently graph luminosity to temperature. Stellar evolution theory followed later.
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