By Jamie Carter

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Go outside tonight when it gets dark and look to the southwestern sky. Can you see Orion’s Belt? Those three bright stars—Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka—are unmistakable, but so is a bright star just above them, the ruddy-colored supergiant Betelgeuse. An icon of the winter night sky in the northern hemisphere, it’s the closest red supergiant star to the solar system.

This “shoulder” star in Orion has a boiling surface and is supposed to be the tenth brightest in the sky. But according to a new study, its brightness has dipped by 0.5 magnitude since late January, according to EarthSky and Sky & Telescope. Is Betelgeuse about to explode?
Exciting Prospect

It’s not likely to happen now, but we do know that Betelgeuse will definitely explode as a supernova sometime in the next 100,000 years. In the lifetime of stars, that’s really soon, but for astronomers, it’s a hugely exciting prospect because a supernova hasn’t been observed going off in our Milky Way galaxy since the 17th century.

A 2023 paper predicts that Betelgeuse’s core will exhaust its carbon fuel in less than 300 years and that “a core collapse leading to a supernova explosion is expected in a few tens of years.”

Betelgeuse—also known as Alpha Orionis—is 20 times the mass of the sun and 1,400 times its size. It’s 650 light years distant from the solar system, so whatever is going on with it right now happened 650 years ago—and we’re only just now seeing its light. Or lack of. But there’s no need to worry because Betelgeuse is well beyond the 50 light-years “supernova danger zone

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