Betelgeuse, Betelbuddy? Astronomers Find Something Unexpected Orbiting Infamous...

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New research has revealed that the star Betelgeuse is likely sharing its orbit with a companion astronomers have nicknamed "Betelbuddy."

According to the new findings, unexpected dips in the star's brightness observed in 2019 caused some scientists to speculate Betelgeuse may soon enter its supernova phase . As a result, media outlets quickly dubbed the tenth brightest star in the sky the doomed star .

Now, an international team of scientists says they've ruled out all conventional explanations for the star's change in brightness, a phenomenon witnessed by observers dating back millennia, including a pending stellar explosion. This analysis left them with the likelihood a companion star is periodically acting like a "snowplow" and clearing light-blocking dust in Betelgeuse's orbit, resulting in the observed changes in brightness.

"We ruled out every intrinsic source of variability that we could think of as to why the brightening and dimming was happening in this way," said astrophysicist Jared Goldberg, the study's lead author and a Flatiron research fellow at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics. "The only hypothesis that seemed to fit is that Betelgeuse has a companion."

Ancient Chinese astronomers first noticed Betelgeuse's periodic changes in brightness as far back as 200 BC, or three centuries before the Ancient Greek scientist Ptolemy described the star's orange-tawny color and astronomical position. According to a 2017 study, Aboriginal Australians have told stories about the star's changes in brightness for over 1,000 years . Notably, the Chinese astronomers described the star as yellow, leading modern researchers to consider whether it was going through a different phase then.

To determine which explanation is most likely, Goldberg and colleagues Meridith Joyce of the University of Wyoming and László Molnár of Konkoly Observatory at the HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences in Hungary turned to computer simulations designed to approximate stellar phenomena. They combined observational data on Betelgeuse taken by conventional telescopes with simulations of the star's activity and watched what happened.