Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse! Astronomers capture clearest image yet of famous star's elusive companion - Space

Astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile's Atacama Desert captured the clearest direct image yet of a suspected companion star orbiting Betelgeuse, offering the strongest evidence to date that the famous star is a binary system, dubbed Betelgeuse A and Betelgeuse B.
Betelgeuse is a red star roughly 650 light-years from Earth, visible to the naked eye in the constellation Orion, whose peculiar dimming has been observed for over 1,000 years.
The idea of a companion star was first proposed around a century ago to explain that dimming, and while previous teams gathered supporting evidence, this observation is the clearest direct look at Betelgeuse B.
Team leader Miguel Montargès of the Observatoire de Paris called it "the conclusion of a century-long quest," saying he "jumped from my chair" upon seeing the processed images.
The search was guided by two 2024 papers predicting the companion would reach its greatest separation from Betelgeuse A in December of that year, allowing the team to target their observations.
Betelgeuse B was previously theorized to be about the mass of the sun, but the new observations indicate it is roughly two to three times more massive, which is why it was detectable despite doubts about the telescope's sensitivity.