Betelgeuse

Its story

Betelgeuse burns red on Orion's shoulder, a supergiant so vast that, placed at the heart of our Solar System, its surface would swallow Jupiter whole. Its light takes nearly five centuries to reach us: what we see tonight set out before Copernicus had published his heliocentric revolution. In the winter of 2019 it underwent a «great dimming» that set astronomers dreaming of an imminent supernova. It will explode one day —tomorrow or a hundred thousand years from now— and then it will shine even by daylight.