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The 10 Brightest Stars
By Pedro Braganca
Special to SPACE.com
posted: 07:00 am ET
15 July 2003
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10. Betelgeuse
Don’t let Betelgeuse’s ranking as the tenth brightest star in the sky fool you.
Its distance -- 430 light-years -- hides the true scale of this supergiant.
With a whopping luminosity of 55,000 suns, Betelgeuse still shines bright in
our skies at a magnitude of 0.5.
Betelgeuse (pronounced beetle juice by most astronomers) derives its
name from an Arabic phrase meaning "the armpit of the central one."
Stars are usually
just points of light, but Hubble resolved some detail of No. 10. |
The star marks the eastern shoulder of mighty Orion, the Hunter. Another name
for Betelgeuse is Alpha Orionis, indicating it is the brightest star in the
winter constellation of Orion. However, Rigel (Beta Orionis) is actually brighter.
The misclassification happened because Betelgeuse is a variable star (a star
that changes brightness over time) and it might have been brighter than Rigel
when Johannes Bayer originally categorized it.
Betelgeuse is an M1 red supergiant, 650 times the diameter and about 15 times
the mass of the Sun. If Betelgeuse were to replace the Sun, planets out to the
orbit of Mars would be engulfed!
Betelgeuse is an ancient star approaching the end of its life cycle. Because
of its mass it might fuse elements all the way to iron and blow up as a supernova
that would be as bright as the crescent Moon, as seen from Earth. A dense neutron
star would be left behind. The other alternative is that it might evolve into
a rare neon-oxygen dwarf.
Betelgeuse was the first star to have its surface directly imaged, a feat accomplished
in 1996 with the Hubble Space Telescope. [Betelgeuse
Map]
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