One of the biggest, brightest stars in the night sky is going to disappear for a little bit! Why? Because an asteroid is going to pass in front of it, creating a special kind of eclipse.
And here's the cool part, lots of people will be able to see it! If you're in places like central Asia's Tajikistan and Armenia, or across Türkiye, Greece, Italy and Spain, you might catch this amazing sight. Even folks in Miami, the Florida Keys and parts of Mexico will get a chance to see this awesome event.
The star is Betelgeuse, a red supergiant in the constellation Orion. The asteroid is Leona, a slowly rotating, oblong space rock in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
So, keep your eyes on the night sky from late Monday into early Tuesday, and you might witness something really neat!
Astronomers hope to learn more about Betelgeuse and Leona through the eclipse, which is expected to last no more than 15 seconds. By observing an eclipse of a much dimmer star than Leona in September, a Spanish-led team recently estimated the asteroid to be about 34 miles wide and 50 miles long (55 kilometers wide and 80 kilometers long).
There are lingering uncertainties over those predictions as well as the size of the star and its expansive atmosphere. It's unclear if the asteroid will obscure the entire star, producing a total eclipse. Rather, the result could be a "ring of fire" eclipse with a minuscule blazing border around the star. If it's a total eclipse, astronomers aren’t sure how many seconds the star will disappear completely, perhaps up to 10 seconds.
"Which scenario we will see is uncertain, making the event even more intriguing," said astronomer Gianluca Masa, founder of the Virtual Telescope Project, which will provide a live webcast from Italy.
An estimated 700 light-years away, Betelgeuse is visible with the naked eye. Binoculars and small telescopes will enhance the view. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
Betelgeuse is thousands of times brighter than our sun and some 700 times bigger. It’s so huge that if it replaced our sun, it would stretch beyond Jupiter, according to NASA.
At just 10 million years old, Betelgeuse is considerably younger than the 4.6 billion-year-old sun. Scientists expect Betelgeuse to be short-lived, given its mass and the speed at which it’s burning through its material.
After countless centuries of varying brightness, Betelgeuse dimmed dramatically in 2019 when a huge bunch of surface material was ejected into space. The resulting dust cloud temporarily blocked the starlight, NASA said, and within a half year, Betelgeuse was as bright as before.
Scientists expect Betelgeuse to go supernova in a violent explosion within 100,000 years.