Betelgeuse

The red supergiant star Betelgeuse is seen here in a new view from the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

Betelgeuse (center) is surrounded by a clumpy envelope of material in its immediate vicinity. The arcs to the left are material ejected from the star as it evolved into a red supergiant, and were shaped by its bow shock interaction with the interstellar medium. A faint linear bar of dust is illuminated at left, and may represent a dusty filament connected to the local galactic magnetic field, or the edge of an interstellar cloud. If so, then Betelgeuse's motion across the sky implies that the arcs will hit the wall in 5,000 years time, with the star itself colliding with the wall 12,500 years later.

This image was taken by Herschel's Photodetecting Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS).

Photo credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS/L. Decin et al.

Note: For more information, see Betelgeuse’s Enigmatic Environment and Betelgeuse Star Braces for Crash with Strange Bar.

The Flames of Betelgeuse

This picture of the dramatic nebula around the bright red supergiant star Betelgeuse was created from images taken with the VISIR infrared camera on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). This structure, resembling flames emanating from the star, forms because the behemoth is shedding its material into space. The earlier NACO observations of the plumes are reproduced in the central disc. The small red circle in the middle has a diameter about four and half times that of the Earth’s orbit and represents the location of Betelgeuse’s visible surface. The black disc corresponds to a very bright part of the image that was masked to allow the fainter nebula to be seen.

Photo credit: ESO/P. Kervella