➡️Betelgeuse Will Briefly Disappear in Once-in-a-Lifetime Coincidence
For six seconds tonight, the constellation Orion will appear to lose the vibrant red star at its shoulder—and scientists are thrilled

Betelgeuse’s brief blip of obscurity will mark a cosmic coincidence: an asteroid will block the star from view over a thin strip of Earth’s surface. Scientists are hailing this celestial alignment as a once-in-a-lifetime occasion that, they hope, will permit them to glimpse Betelgeuse’s ever changing surface of hot and cold patches in the best resolution to date.

The opportunity comes courtesy of a sizable asteroid called Leona, which astronomers first spotted in 1891. On its own, Leona is just another space rock cluttering up the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. But at 8:17 P.M. ET on December 11 Leona will slip directly between Earth and Betelgeuse, a red supergiant star that, unlike the asteroid, has been recognized by countless generations of humans around the world.
Betelgeuse marks one bright shoulder of the constellation Orion and is located just 650 light-years from Earth. Although its brightness regularly rises and falls, the star grabbed the spotlight in 2019 when astronomers realized it was fading rapidly in what became known as the “Great Dimming.” Despite hopes that earthlings would get a front-row seat to the explosion that will mark the star’s supernova end sometime in the next 10,000 to 100,000 years, Betelgeuse has persisted—although the star’s brightness has been changing more quickly than it used to.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/betelgeuse-will-briefly-disappear-in-once-in-a-lifetime-coincidence/