After a weird event dubbed the Great Dimming in 2019, the plasma that makes up Betelgeuse is sloshing around inside the star, erasing pulsations that have been measured for centuries
Space 17 August 2022
By Leah Crane
Betelgeuse is up to its usual tricks again
Stocktrek Images, Inc./Alamy
Betelgeuse is still acting strange. As the star recovers from blasting out a huge amount of its innards in late 2019 in an event that became known as the Great Dimming, its surface is now bouncing like gelatin on a plate, and it has lost the natural 400-day heartbeat that has been present for at least two centuries.
Andrea Dupree at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and her colleagues analysed observations from a slew of telescopes to unravel what happened …