One of the brightest stars in the night sky is named Beteljuice.

It's about 650 light years away, which is pretty close in outer space terms.

And if you've gazed up into the night sky and seen the constellation Orion,

you've seen Beteljuice before.

So if you were to look up at it, you would want to start by finding the three stars

that make a nice little line that we call Orion's belt.

And then Beteljuice is, as you're looking at it, the shoulder of Orion on the left.

Emily Leveck is an astronomer at the University of Washington,

whose studies stars like Beteljuice, which is known as a red super giant,

super giant because this star is enormous, much bigger than our sun.

If you were to put Beteljuice where our sun is, it would swallow up all of the planets out past

Mars. And because it's so massive, it means that it goes through a very different sort of

life experience than our sun will.

Which brings us to why we're talking about Beteljuice right now.

In recent weeks, astronomers have noticed that Beteljuice no longer appears to be one of the

brightest stars in the night sky. There were sort of quick reports put out from people who monitor

and observe Beteljuice very frequently saying, you know, it's getting dimmer and dimmer.

It's starting to get closest to the dimest we've seen.

There's also big dedicated networks of amateur astronomers that keep very close track of the

brightness of stars like Beteljuice. And they started noticing the same thing.

When we called Emily, she was preparing for this big astronomy conference in Hawaii.

And she thought there would be a lot of buzz there about the dimming of Beteljuice.

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