It Took a Century, but Astronomers Imaged Betelgeuse’s Companion

Betelgeuse is the red supergiant star in the shoulder of Orion. For decades, astronomers have suspected that Betelgeuse has a companion star orbiting around it. The image in the middle inset in this image was taken in January 2019 with the SPHERE instrument at ESO’s VLT, and shows Betelgeuse itself. The image in the inset on the left was taken in December 2024, when the companion was predicted to be furthest apart from Betelgeuse as seen from Earth. In this inset, Betelgeuse has been removed, revealing a source (marked with a crosshair) consistent with being Betelgeuse B. Credit: ESO/M. Montargès et al. Background: N. Rissinger (skysurvey.org)

Most of us are familiar with Betelgeuse (also known as alpha Orionis), the bright shoulder star in the constellation Orion. It’s a red supergiant star that lies somewhere between 400 and 550 light-years away from us and is quite bright. Betelgeuse contains about 14 times the mass of the Sun and is a fairly young star compared to ours. It appears to be no more than 10 million years old, which means that it evolved rapidly from a protostar to the red giant we see today. That lifecycle means Betelgeuse will explode as a supernova sometime in the relatively near future — say within the next 100,000 years.

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