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Surrounded by a shell of potassium gas, this red supergiant could explode soon.
To correctly pronounce Orion's famous shoulder star, "bet" on Betelgeuse. But most Americans instead call it "beetle juice," like the 1988 Michael Keaton film. Either way, it's on the "top 10" list of the most beloved bright stars. It's also one of the few visible from every country in the world. Only the several dozen brave maniacs permanently living at the South Pole never see it.
New research declares Betelgeuse to be the largest of the night's bright stars, edging out its summertime rival, Antares. Its immensity can be grasped with a model: If it were a colossal orange beach ball big enough to enclose a 10-story building - take a moment to picture it - then on that same scale, Earth would be the period at the end of this sentence.
While it's hard to imagine something so immense doing anything but lazily holding court like Iabba the Hut, Betelgeuse rapidly changes size. Breathing in and out like an anesthesiologist's oxygen ball, it speedily mutates from 700 times the diameter of our Sun to a globe 50 percent bigger than that. If our Sun puffed out that much, Jupiter would be its nearest planet,...