Betelgeuse, the red shoulder of Orion, is a supergiant so swollen that it would reach past the orbit of Mars if it replaced the Sun.
It has burned through its hydrogen and puffed into a cool red giant hundreds of times wider than our star. Earth and Mars would sit inside the star, not around it.
Betelgeuse will end as a supernova, though that may still be many thousands of years away. Its size is the reminder that not every star is a tidy Sun-like dot.
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