Red giant star Betelgeuse mysteriously shrinking

BERKELEY — The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has steadily shrunk over the past 15 years, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers. Long-term monitoring by UC Berkeley's Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern California shows that Betelgeuse (bet' el juz), which is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993. The three telescopes of the Infrared Spatial Interferometer lined up east-west on Mt. Wilson in Southern California. The telescopes are mounted in semi-trailers so that they can be moved. The building with the periscopes houses a laser which is transmitted to all three telescopes (David Hale 2006) "To see this change is very striking," said Charles Townes, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus of physics who won the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the laser and the maser, a microwave laser.
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