A handout picture made available by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows the Betelgeuse red supergiant. (Photo: EFE)
A handout picture made available by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows the Betelgeuse red supergiant. (Photo: EFE)

PHOTO | A handout picture made available by the European Space Agency (ESA) shows the Betelgeuse red supergiant, the first direct image of a star other than the Sun, made with the Hubble Space Telescope in ultraviolet light with the Faint Object Camera (FOC) on 03 March 1995 (issued 16 August 2020), and subsequently enhanced by NASA.

Called Alpha Orionis, or Betelgeuse, it is a red supergiant star marking the shoulder of the winter constellation Orion the Hunter.

The Hubble image reveals a huge ultraviolet atmosphere with a mysterious hot spot on the stellar behemoth’s surface.

The enormous bright spot, which is many hundreds times the diameter of Sun, is at least 2,000 Kelvin degrees hotter than the surface of the star.

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