Star
Betelgeuse
said close to "beetle juice"
A huge red star marking Orion's shoulder. The name comes from Arabic, and the star will one day end as a supernova.
Where the name comes from
Betelgeuse traces back to an Arabic phrase, probably yad al-jawza, the hand of the giant, or a close description of the figure’s shoulder. Centuries of copying between Arabic, Latin and English slowly garbled it into the spelling we use now. The usual pronunciation really is close to “beetle juice”.
A genuinely enormous star
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant. If you dropped it where our Sun sits, it would swallow Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars and reach out past them toward Jupiter. It only looks like a modest orange dot because it is roughly six hundred light years away. Everything huge in the sky looks small enough when it is that far off.
The night it dimmed
Through late 2019 and early 2020 Betelgeuse did something strange. It faded by more than half, clearly enough to notice with the naked eye, and astronomers wondered aloud whether it was finally about to blow. It was not. The star had coughed out a cloud of dust that briefly veiled it, and within months it climbed back to its usual brightness. Betelgeuse is a variable star, always breathing a little brighter and dimmer.
It will explode, eventually
Betelgeuse is near the end of its life and will one day end as a supernova. When it does, it will blaze bright enough to cast shadows at night and show in broad daylight for weeks. That could be tonight or a hundred thousand years from now, nobody can say, and at six hundred light years it is far too distant to do us any harm. It would just be the show of a lifetime.
Questions
Will Earth be in danger when Betelgeuse explodes?
No. At around six hundred light years away it is far too distant to harm us. It would simply be a spectacular new light in the sky, bright enough to see in daylight for a while.
Did Betelgeuse nearly explode in 2020?
No. It dimmed dramatically in late 2019 and early 2020, which made headlines, but the cause was a cloud of dust the star had thrown off, not the start of a supernova. It brightened back to normal within months.
Sources: Size, distance and variability data from standard stellar references.