© Carnegie Mellon University
Astronomers have long suspected that Betelgeuse — the bright red star blazing in Orion's shoulder — wasn't alone. Now, thanks to a fleeting cosmic window and swift action by Carnegie Mellon University researchers, the true nature of its elusive companion has been illuminated.
In a race against time, the CMU researchers secured Director's Discretionary Time on both NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope to investigate the long-predicted — but never detected — companion star to Betelgeuse. The timing was critical: around Dec. 6,
the companion, nicknamed "Betelbuddy," reached its maximum separation from the massive red supergiant just before it would disappear behind it for two more years."It turns out that there had never been a good observation where Betelbuddy wasn't behind Betelgeuse," said Anna O'Grady, a McWilliams Postdoctoral Fellow at Carnegie Mellon's
McWilliams Center for Cosmology and Astrophysics. "This represents the deepest X-ray observations of Betelgeuse to date."
During this ideal observational window, the Gemini North Telescope in Hawaii captured a faint image near Betelgeuse that could be its tiny companion. In a separate study, the Carnegie Mellon-led team used Chandra to collect X-ray data to determine the nature of the mysterious object.
"It could have been a white dwarf. It could have been a neutron star. And those are very, very different objects," O'Grady said. "If it was one of those objects, it would point to a very different evolutionary history for the system."
