PHOENIX — Like a motorboat doing doughnuts in a lake, Betelgeuse’s companion star leaves a wake within the large star’s ambiance.
Indicators of the smaller star’s path across the pink supergiant are one of the best proof but that Betelgeuse’s buddy truly exists.
“It confirms there actually is an object there making a wake, actually, actually, actually,” says astrophysicist Andrea Dupree, who offered the proof on the American Astronomical Society assembly on January 5.
Betelgeuse marks one of many shoulders of the constellation Orion. Its brightness modifications periodically. Over centuries of observations, astronomers have recognized two distinct cycles, or intervals, of brightening and dimming, one lasting about 400 days and one about 2,100 days.
Betelgeuse’s intrinsic pulsations trigger the quick interval. “However the lengthy interval, we actually didn’t know,” Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Heart for Astrophysics mentioned in a January 5 information convention on the assembly.
In 2024, one other group of astronomers discovered an evidence for the longer interval: Betelgeuse has a smaller companion, in regards to the mass of the solar. Different astronomers launched a fuzzy {photograph} of the purported pal in 2025.
However neither of these outcomes “made everybody say, OK, drawback solved, let’s go dwelling,” Dupree says.
The companion’s orbit put it at a distance from Betelgeuse simply 4 instances that of Earth from the solar. Meaning it must be throughout the supergiant’s outer ambiance — Betelgeuse is so large that its floor might envelop Jupiter if it had been the star in our photo voltaic system.
Dupree and colleagues realized that perilous place meant the smaller star ought to drive a wake via the gasoline. The staff used eight years of information from the Hubble Area Telescope and telescopes on the bottom to seek for indicators of the companion’s results on Betelgeuse’s prolonged ambiance.
The staff discovered that sure wavelengths of sunshine grew brighter after the companion handed in entrance of Betelgeuse’s face and slowly dimmed because the companion moved behind the star. That’s in step with a slowly increasing outflow of gasoline trailing behind the companion — the wake. The outcome was offered in a poster on the assembly and in a paper posted on arXiv.org.
“I believe that Andrea’s outcome may be very convincing and provides one other ‘brick within the wall’ of proof for the companion’s existence,” says stellar astrophysicist Anna O’Grady of Carnegie Mellon College in Pittsburgh. Between the theoretical papers arguing for the star’s existence, the picture and O’Grady’s personal work displaying that the item doesn’t emit X-rays, that means it’s in all probability not a black gap or neutron star, she is “extraordinarily satisfied” that the star is actual.
Betelgeuse is at the moment eclipsing the companion. However when the star comes again into view in 2027, “we’re actually going to search for it,” Dupree mentioned. She additionally plans to take a look at different supergiant stars with lengthy and quick intervals to see in the event that they, too, have unseen companions.
