Astronomers have used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in the Atacama Desert region of Northern Chile to discover the strongest evidence yet that the famous star Betelgeuse has a companion star. That means after a century of investigation, scientists are closer than ever before to conclusively identifying Betelgeuse as a binary system composed of two stars, Betelgeuse A and Betelgeuse B.
Betelgeuse is a red colored star visible with the naked eye in the constellation of Orion and located around 650 light-years from Earth. Astronomers initially proposed the existence of another star orbiting Betelgeuse around 100 years ago in an attempt to explain the familiar star's strange dimming, which has been observed for over 1,000 years. While other teams have gathered evidence of the existence of
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