Betelgeuse: a Review
J. Craig Wheeler, Emmanouil Chatzopoulos

TL;DR
This review summarizes current observations and theories about Betelgeuse, a nearby red supergiant, highlighting its complex surface, unusual rotation, motion, variability, and recent dimming event, and discusses its impending supernova.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive synthesis of Betelgeuse's physical properties, evolutionary history, and recent phenomena, emphasizing unresolved issues and future research directions.
Findings
Betelgeuse exhibits complex surface convection and variability.
It has an anomalously rapid rotation possibly due to binary evolution.
The 2020 Great Dimming was caused by dust and surface spots.
Abstract
Betelgeuse has fascinated people since they first looked at the sky. Here we present a contemporary summary of the observations and theory that lead to our understanding of Betelgeuse as a massive red supergiant doomed to collapse and explosion. At only ~200 parsecs from Earth, Betelgeuse can be spatially resolved yet uncertainties in its distance remain a critical impediment to deeper understanding. The surface of Betelgeuse is rent with a complex structure as deep convective eddies arise to the surface affecting most of its measured physical properties. Determination of the equatorial rotation velocity is critical since some current estimates indicate that Betelgeuse is rotating anomalously rapidly, a property that cannot be explained by single-star evolutionary models. Betelgeuse is also moving through space at relatively high velocity that indicates that it received a boost, likely…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAstronomical Observations and Instrumentation · Astro and Planetary Science · Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae
