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Betelgeuse is 3,527,099,888,526,000 miles away or 600 light-years.

Betelgeuse is so big that if you put it in the place of the sun it would completely swallow up Mercury, Venus, Earth, the moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt, Ceres (a dwarf planet) and engulf Jupiter, with all its’ moons, with its’ atmosphere (it is more than twice the size of earth’s orbit around the sun).

Name means “soldier’s armpit” because it takes the place of Orion’s (a constellation) armpit.

To grasp the size of this star we better consider it this way. You can fit 182,374,248,

978,792 earths in Betelgeuse.

That is enough earths, if the earth were the size of a banana, that you could line the bananas up end-to-end and it would reach from earth to Eris, a dwarf planet 6.29 billion miles away from the sun, then from Eris to Jupiter, around Jupiter, back to earth, around earth 29,000 times, a trip to the sun, around the sun 350 times, then to the moon, around the moon 1 million times, then back to earth and back to the moon and back 44 times . . . with enough bananas left over to feed 3,000,000 monkeys 791 times!

This amazing star can be found in the night sky be looking to the North on September-October months in the Northern Hemisphere in the Orion Constellation (shown in the “Atmosphere of Betelgeuse” picture). Do some more research on NASA or Hubble to find more specifics.

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