# Betelgeuse, Up Close: A Star's Boiling Skin, Revealed

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Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/betelgeuse-up-close-a-star-s-boiling-skin-revealed.md
Podcast: [Astronomy Daily: Latest Space News](https://stenobird.com/podcast/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676)
Published: 2026-08-26T09:25:52+00:00
Episode link: https://www.astronomydaily.io
Audio file: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/mgln.ai/track/op3.dev/e/api.spreaker.com/download/episode/74695033/betelgeuse_up_close_a_star_s_boiling_skin_revealed.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/astronomy-daily-space-news-updates-5658676/episodes/betelgeuse-up-close-a-star-s-boiling-skin-revealed
Duration seconds: 937

## Resource

Today's episode — S05E177, Wednesday August 26, 2026: Feature story: Astronomers using the ALMA array in Chile, led by Bill Dent (European Southern Observatory), have released the most detailed picture yet of the actual surface of Betelgeuse, the red supergiant marking Orion's shoulder — a corrugated, irregular surface with bright convective hot spots, some nearly 1,000°F hotter than the surrounding plasma. One hot spot in the northeastern region has persisted for more than seven years, far longer than current models predict, and its orientation lines up with the position of Betelgeuse B — a companion star imaged for the first time in July by a separate VLT/SPHERE study — raising the possibility the companion is influencing the giant star's surface. Betelgeuse is one of the closest stars to us expected to eventually go supernova (on a timescale of roughly the next 100,000 years); Dent notes the imagery builds a crucial "before" baseline for whenever that happens. The rest of the news: ISS Spacewalk 98: NASA's Anil Menon and ESA's Sophie Adenot finished replacing a Space-to-Ground antenna on the station, six and a half hours outside, restoring communications redundancy that had been running on a backup since November. Adenot's spacewalk record as the first French woman to conduct an EVA is now backed by two completed outings. Solar flare/CME: The Sun fired an M6.9 flare from sunspot region 4513, triggering radio blackouts over Africa, Europe and the Arctic; a slow-moving CME is due to graze Earth around Friday, August 28, with an outside chance of minor geomagnetic storming — mostly a Northern Hemisphere aurora story. Falcon 9 reuse record: SpaceX's booster B1067 flew for the 37th time — a new single-booster reuse record — on the company's 100th Falcon 9 launch of 2026.…

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