Astronomers watch Betelgeuse recover after colossal blast

Just like the mischievous Tim Burton character of the same name, the red supergiant star Betelgeuse's head shrank. Scientists watched the star blast its outer surface into space in 2019, an unexpected cosmic event they had never seen before in a normal star. The eruption was so catastrophic, it blew off 400 billion times as much material as the sun does routinely in ejections linked to solar flares, according to the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. What's more, the star got so dim