Betelgeuse is Shrinking!

From Red giant star Betelgeuse mysteriously shrinking

Long-term monitoring by UC Berkeley’s Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern California shows that Betelgeuse (bet’ el juz), which is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.

Since Betelgeuse’s radius is about five astronomical units, or five times the radius of Earth’s orbit, that means the star’s radius has shrunk by a distance equal to the orbit of Venus.

See also Shrinking Betelgeuse and some comments by John Baez, including the suggestion that Betelgeuse may be about to go supernova.

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