© Herschel/ESAA photograph of the red supergiant Betelgeuse interacting with a mysterious dusty wall.
But look at Betelgeuse with a really powerful telescope, like the European Space Agency's Herschel telescope, and you'll see something like this: the red supergiant Betelgeuse in all its glory, smashing its ferocious solar winds into its environment.
In this photograph, just released from the European Space Agency, you can see the powerful solar winds creating a bow shock around the star as it ploughs through the interstellar medium at a speed of 30 km/s. Closer into the star there are asymmetric structures, where the star shed material in fits and starts into its surroundings, like convective bubbles randomly popping to the top of a pot of boiling water.
