Over time, Betelgeuse changed color. Now it’s also lost its rhythm

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The star Betelgeuse has always been a diva.

Astronomers from antiquity through the present day have watched the red supergiant pulsing at the shoulder of the constellation Orion, and the star has continually put on a show, two new studies suggest. Betelgeuse may still be recovering from a deep dimming episode a few years ago, one team reports. And the star appears to have put on its reddish stage makeup just 2,000 years ago, before which it wore yellow, another team says.

Together, these studies could tell researchers about how stars spew their guts into space and hint at how long it will be before Betelgeuse explodes in a supernova.

“This star always fools you,” says astronomer Edward Guinan of Villanova University in Pennsylvania, who has studied Betelgeuse for decades and was not involved in the new works. “You think you have it, and all of a sudden, it changes.”

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