Bright Stars of Orion - Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Belt Stars

welcome to learn the sky your online resource for learning about the stars and constellations welcome my name is janine and in this video we're going to look at the bright stars of the constellation known as orion so we are going to look at these seven main stars in detail and learn about the stars characteristics but if you want to learn more about how to find this constellation in the sky and how it points to many other constellations i have a whole detailed video about that so be sure to go see that video but in this

video we're really going to focus on the brighter stars within orion right here what we're looking at are the belt stars in detail so let's get started if you're new to this channel be sure to hit the subscribe button and click the bell for notifications about all new videos if you want to learn more about stargazing be sure to visit my new website we've got some freebies there as well as new seasonal classes that have just been released the first star i want to take a look at is called betelgeuse and keep in mind that

there's many pronunciations of this star and i'm also often challenged by this in the comments section of my channel that i'm pronouncing it wrong however i've worked with other astronomers and other educators that have pronounced it as betelgeuse however i've also heard it pronounced betel juice as well as beetlejuice i kind of feel like people say beetlejuice because of that movie with michael keaton in the 90s but which is a movie i absolutely love but um i will be pronouncing it as betelgeuse and this is designated as the alpha star of the constellation but it's

actually the second brightest star of orion the brightest is actually rigel but rigel does have the beta designation and the reason for that is because in the past before we had you know high forms of technology looking at these stars we would be relying on the human eye to determine which were the brightest stars and human eyes are a little bit more unreliable as opposed to the instruments we use today to look at stars but betelgeuse is a red super giant star and it's estimated to be 624 light years away and it's a semi-regular variable

star so what does that even mean it means that this star can change its brightness over the course of time the name betelgeuse is the arabic name meaning armpit of orion that's a an interesting way to to name a star but i've also heard that it's um or read that it is named after the hand of orion what's interesting about this star is that it's a potential supernova candidate that could be visible from earth so in 2019 into 2020 what we were seeing is that the brightness of this star was changing so here you can

see the usual magnitude of this orange type star and that's the way to to identify it as well is that almost all the main stars of orion are blue except this one but what happened is that the brightness of this star was unusual it started to dim and i definitely noticed it especially after i've been viewing orion through all these years and scientists have some idea as to why this was at first they were thinking oh this is going to become a supernova which would have been awesome because we could have seen it from our

from from earth and that's not something that's usual where we can actually see a supernova without magnification but if we take a look at this picture here you can see a picture of betelgeuse in early january of 2019 but in december of 2019 you can see that the brightness of it shifts right here it just seems a little bit more dim as compared to this particular picture and also notice the shape it's not perfectly spherical so scientists are still examining this star to understand why its brightness changes over time the next bright star that we're

going to take a look at is called rigel and this is a blue supergiant star that's estimated to be 864.2 light years away rigel is actually a quadruple star system and the name rigel is an arabic name meaning foot most of the star names are derived from arabic names and what's interesting about a ride rigel is that it is in fact the brightest star of this constellation even though it's designated as the beta star it is expected that this star will become a supernova in its lifetime and eventually become a black hole or perhaps a

neutron star our next star right here is known as bellatrix and the name bellatrix is an arabic name for female warrior which if anyone here is a harry potter fan i definitely am kind of obsessed with those books you know that one of the characters in there is bellatrix and you can see why uh jk rowling would name her that because she is a really fierce character bellatrix is estimated to be 245 light years away and it's marked as the 27th brightest star in the night sky however it's it's estimated that it it is too

small to really become a supernova and its luminosity comes from the fact that it has a really high temperature as opposed to being really big and it is marked as orion's left shoulder if we were to do a comparison of our own sun with bellatrix here you can see this is our sun this is algol i've got a whole video about that star so if you want to learn more about it go see that video and then this is bellatrix so you can see it's blue in color and it's larger in size to our own

sun the next star we're going to take a look at is known as safe and this is a blue giant star that's estimated to be 650 light years away its name safe is an arabic name meaning sword of the giant and it's destined to become a supernova so at this point it has exhausted its supply of hydrogen and it's it's no longer considered to be a main sequence star it also has the mass that's 28 times that of our own sun and it's estimated to be an age of 6.2 million years another star we're going

to take a look at is this one right here and even though it's not a part of the seven main brighter stars i thought it was worth taking a look at and mesa is a blue giant star that's estimated to be 1 100 light years away and it's actually a binary system its name mesa is an arabic name meaning the shining one and if we were to zoom in in this particular region it is estimated to be a possible supernova remnant so it's kind of surrounded by this area of nebulosity it's about 12 degrees across

and this is thought to be the remains of a supernova remnant now this is not something you would necessarily see with the naked eye this picture was taken over a long period of time which allows the gases to shine through on the photograph in the final portion of this video we're going to take a look at the belt stars of orion which in and of itself is an asterism that can be used to point to other constellations so if you were to draw a line in this direction through the belt stars it'll point you to

canis major which is orion's great hunting dog and i have a whole video on that constellation so if you want to learn more click on that link below and then if you draw a line in this direction it'll lead you to taurus i've got a really detailed video about taurus because it's one of my favorite constellations so be sure to go see that video but now let's go over the names we have alnatak right here all nalam right here and mintaka and all these are arabic names in fact most of the name the common names

of the stars are derived from the arabic language now al-natak is an arabic word meaning the girdle and it's estimated to be 800 light years away and right near the star which i'll show you in a little bit is the horsehead nebula which is definitely one of my favorites because it really does look like a horse head so you can see why scientists named it or name nebulas after what they resemble next we have analam and this is an arabic term meaning string of pearls and this star is estimated to be 1 342 light years

away and then right here is mintaka this is an arabic name meaning belt and it's estimated to be 916 light years away so if we were to zoom in on this region we get this fascinating picture which i just love because i feel like i'm always finding different things in it the more i look at it but if we were to point out the belt stars here is where it's located we have on the talk right here we have all nalam and mintaka but there's some other interesting things going on as well below on the

talk is sigma orionis and this is the star that's helping to illuminate the horsehead nebula so if you want to see the horsehead nebula it's something you would definitely need magnification to see but it's such a beautiful object so if you have the opportunity to ever see it through a telescope i encourage you to do so something else i just noticed is that there seems to be like a ring i don't know if you can see this shape of a ring around the middle star here i just i just kind of noticed that as i

look at this picture more and if we were to examine the size of these and compare them to our own sun here we have um the sun which is one solar mass and one solar radius so if you look at almatak al-nalam and mintaka you can see that all of them are much much larger than our own sun and since on the talk is of 20 solar masses this one's a 40 solar masses and this one's 20 it is likely that all three of these stars are to become a supernova now when that will happen

i'm not really sure but it's just interesting that if you're looking at these three stars one two three that they're all larger than our sun and they're all expected to become supernovae we've come to the end of our video about the bright stars of orion so i hope you've enjoyed learning a little bit more about these seven main stars in detail what's fascinating to me is that all of these stars are much bigger than the sun and many of them have the potential to go supernova which if this ever happens particularly with this star it

would be amazing to see in our lifetime remember it takes time patience and practice to identify the constellations but with orion it really is one of those constellations that's the easiest to find and it can be seen all throughout the world i wish you luck finding all of these stars keep going outside and keep looking up [Music]