Every superhero – or anti-hero – needs a sidekick. And it turns out that Beetle juice Betelgeuse actually has one! THE red supergiant star found in the constellation Orion has captivated stargazers for millennia, and although scientists had long hypothesized that it had a companion due to its periodic dimming, no one had ever seen it. Until recently! World, meet Betelbuddy.
After the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii photographed a faint potential companion to Betelgeuse, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) used the NASA image. Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope to examine Betelgeuse in more detail. And the timing was perfect – Betelbuddy, as the little companion is nicknamed – was at his maximum distance from his much larger and much brighter neighbor. (Betelgeuse is about 700 times the size of our sun and thousands of times brighter.) Finally, the researchers made detailed and concrete observations.
“It turns out there has never been a good observation where Betelbuddy wasn’t behind Betelgeuse,” Anna O’Grady, a postdoctoral researcher at CMU, said in a statement. statement. “This represents the deepest X-ray observations of Betelgeuse to date.”
Impressively, capturing an image of Betelbuddy was only the beginning of the discoveries. The researchers predicted that the companion would be a white dwarf or a neutron starbut they saw no sign of accretion, a distinct signature of the two types of objects. Instead, they suspect it could be a young stellar object the size of our sun.
And therein lies the next major discovery. The size ratio between Betelgeuse and Betelbuddy calls into question what we currently know binary stars. Generally, binary stars have similar masses. But Betelgeuse has about 16 to 17 times the mass of our sun, while Betelbuddy has about the same mass as our sun.
“This opens up a new regime of extreme mass ratio binaries,” O’Grady said. “This is an area that has been little explored because it is very difficult to find them, or even identify them, as we were able to do with Bételgeuse.”
This is just the beginning of Betelgeuse and Betelbuddy’s story, and we can’t wait to see where it takes us next.
The team’s research will be published in The Astrophysics Journal on October 10.
