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Mystery solved? Dust cloud caused Betelgeuse star's weird dimming, study finds - Space.com
Jun 17, 2021 1 min, 12 secs

In the fall of 2019, Betelgeuse — one of the brightest and best-known stars in the sky — began dimming dramatically.

So some astronomers speculated that this "Great Dimming" might be the beginning of Betelgeuse's death throes, and that the star could soon go boom.

Related: The brightest stars in the sky: A starry countdown.

Betelgeuse bounced back to its expected brightness levels by April 2020, bolstering the more prosaic explanations for the Great Dimming.

Researchers led by Miguel Montargès, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory and Université PSL, studied Betelgeuse before and during the Great Dimming, using multiple instruments installed at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. .

Together, the data sets suggest a likely Great Dimming scenario, which comports with previous research based on Hubble Space Telescope observations.

"Our results confirm that the Great Dimming is not an indication of Betelgeuse’s imminent explosion as a supernova," Montargès and his colleagues wrote in the new study, which was published online today (June 16) in the journal Nature!

The new research could have applications beyond merely understanding Betelgeuse, which lies about 720 light-years from Earth (though calculations of its distance vary a bit), astronomer Emily Levesque wrote in an accompanying "News and Views" piece in the same issue of Nature. .

"This exquisitely detailed study of Betelgeuse’s unexpected behavior lays the groundwork for unravelling the properties of an entire population of stars," wrote Levesque, who's based at the University of Washington.

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