The small, furtive companion of one of the brightest stars in Earth's night sky has just turned out to be something no one suspected.

Instead of being the kind of object astronomers expected to find orbiting mega-weirdo Betelgeuse , the binary companion appears to be a young, Sun-like star. This discovery offers a new window into the troubled star's mysterious past.

"It could have been a white dwarf. It could have been a neutron star . And those are very, very different objects," says astrophysicist Anna O'Grady of Carnegie Mellon University in the US. "If it was one of those objects, it would point to a very different evolutionary history for the system."

Betelgeuse , a red supergiant star thought to be about 548 light-years away in the constellation of Orion, has long been a

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