The star Betelgeuse is pronounced like what two English words?
Betelgeuse The star's unusual name inspired the title of the 1988 film "Beetlejuice", and script writer Michael McDowell was impressed by how many people made the connection. In the popular science fiction series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, Ford Prefect was from "a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse." Two American navy ships were named after the star, both of them World War II vessels, the launched in 1939 and launched in 1944. In 1979, a French supertanker named "Betelgeuse" was moored off Whiddy Island discharging oil when it exploded, killing 50 people in one
Betelgeuse structure is estimated to be at least one parsec wide, assuming a distance of 643 light-years. Hydrodynamic simulations of the bow shock made in 2012 indicate that it is very young—less than 30,000 years old—suggesting two possibilities: that Betelgeuse moved into a region of the interstellar medium with different properties only recently or that Betelgeuse has undergone a significant transformation producing a changed stellar wind. A 2012 paper, proposed that this phenomenon was caused by Betelgeuse transitioning from a blue supergiant (BSG) to a red supergiant (RSG). There is evidence that in the late evolutionary stage of a star like