The star Betelgeuse has stopped dimming – but it’s still acting weird

After a weird event dubbed the Great Dimming in 2019, the plasma that makes up Betelgeuse is sloshing around inside the star, erasing pulsations that have been measured for centuries



Space



17 August 2022

Betelgeuse is up to its usual tricks again

Stocktrek Images, Inc./Alamy

Betelgeuse is still acting strange. As the star recovers from blasting out a huge amount of its innards in late 2019 in an event that became known as the Great Dimming, its surface is now bouncing like gelatin on a plate, and it has lost the natural 400-day heartbeat that has been present for at least two centuries.

Andrea Dupree at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and her colleagues analysed observations from a slew of telescopes to unravel what happened …

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