After a century of speculation, astronomers using ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) have captured the clearest evidence yet that the red supergiant Betelgeuse is orbited by a faint companion star. “We have shown that Betelgeuse is not single, it is accompanied by a faint stellar companion,” said Dr. Miguel Montargès, an astronomer at the Observatoire de Paris. Dr. Montargès and colleagues detected a faint point of light near Betelgeuse using the SPHERE-ZIMPOL instrument, an extreme adaptive optics system designed for high-contrast imaging. The astronomers estimate Betelgeuse B is a young star of about 2.6 to 3.1 solar masses. Because it is more massive than predicted, we see it,” Dr. Montargès said.