This image
of Betelgeuse is a color composite made from exposures from the Digitized Sky
Survey 2 (DSS2). (Image courtesy of ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2.
Acknowledgment: Davide De Martin.)
Joel Kontinen
The star Betelgeuse has a smaller star that’s named Betelbuddy. Betelgeuse is about 700 times the size of our sun and thousands of times brighter.
"It
turns out that there had never been a good observation where Betelbuddy wasn't
behind Betelgeuse," Anna O’Grady, a postdoctoral fellow at CMU,"said
in a statement. "This represents the deepest
X-ray observations of Betelgeuse to date.”
Impressively,
capturing an image of Betelbuddy was only the start of the discoveries. The
researchers had anticipated the companion to be a white dwarf or a neutron star, but they saw no signs of accretion, a
distinct signature of both types of objects. Instead, they suspect it might be
a young stellar object about the size of our sun.
And herein
lies the next major discovery. The size ratio between Betelgeuse and Betelbuddy
challenges what we currently know about binary stars. Typically, binary stars have similar masses.
But Betelgeuse is about 16 to 17 times the mass of our sun, whereas Betelbuddy
has about the same mass as our sun.
"This
opens up a new regime of extreme mass ratio binaries,” O’Grady said. "It's
an area that hasn’t been explored much because it's so difficult to find them
or to even identify them like we were able to do with Betelgeuse."
Stars come in all sized but there is only one planet, that harbors life.
Source:
Stefanie Waldek 2025
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