Despite (or perhaps because of) its peculiar appellation, Betelgeuse is among the best known stars. Its prominent position just on Orion’s shoulder doesn’t hurt, of course. Nor does its fortune in being one of the few bright stars visible in every country in both hemispheres. Hovering above Earth’s equator, its orange light rains down on people everywhere from November through April, when our planet whirls us around to face it.
Betelgeuse (its name is probably derived from an Arabic phrase meaning armpit of the white-belted sheep) is the largest of the night’s major stars, the prototypical supergiant. Its hugeness can be grasped with a model: if this colossus were scaled down so that its diameter equaled the height of a ten-story building, then on that same scale Earth would be the period at the end of this sentence.
It’s hard to imagine something so immense doing anything but lazily holding ...
