Why We Named Our Studio After Betelgeuse

People ask us two things about our name. The first is how to say it. You'll hear "BET-el-jooz" and "BEET-el-jooz", and both are fine. The second is why we picked it.

The short answer: Betelgeuse is a star you can find without a telescope, it's restless and full of surprises, and it burns bright. The longer answer involves a star big enough to swallow Mars's orbit, a famous scare in 2020, and a name that probably comes from a copying mistake.

Where to find it

Betelgeuse sits in Orion, one of the easiest constellations to spot. Find the three stars in a row that make Orion's belt. Above them and to one side is a bright, distinctly orange-red star marking the hunter's shoulder. That's Betelgeuse. Diagonally across the constellation is Rigel, a blue-white star marking his foot. The contrast between the two is easy to see with the naked eye.

Betelgeuse also forms one corner of the Winter Triangle, with Sirius and Procyon. It lies close to the celestial equator, so it can be seen from almost everywhere people live. In the Northern Hemisphere, it's an evening fixture through winter; in the Southern Hemisphere, it's a summer star.

How big is it?

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, one of the largest stars visible to the naked eye. Its radius is roughly 700 to 1,000 times the Sun's, depending on which estimate you use.

Pinning that down is hard. The star has no sharp edge, it's wrapped in gas and dust, and it changes size as it pulses. But every estimate in that range gives the same striking picture: put Betelgeuse where the Sun is and its surface would reach well past the orbit of Mars, out into the asteroid belt, and at the higher estimates most of the way to Jupiter.

For a sense of scale, the Sun is about 1.39 million km across (it's the biggest object in Scale It!, our size-comparison game). Betelgeuse would be somewhere around one to 1.4 billion kilometres across.

Size isn't everything, though. Betelgeuse is thought to have something like 15 to 20 times the Sun's mass. It's enormous because it's swollen and diffuse, not because it's dense. Its surface is also cooler than the Sun's, which is why it glows orange-red rather than white.

How far away is it?

Roughly 550 light-years, according to a widely cited recent estimate. Other measurements have placed it farther, beyond 700 light-years. Its distance is unusually tricky to measure because the star appears as a large, lumpy disc with bright patches that shift over time, which muddles the tiny position changes astronomers rely on.

Whatever the exact figure, the light you see tonight left Betelgeuse centuries ago.

A star that breathes

Most stars look steady. Betelgeuse doesn't. Its brightness rises and falls as the star pulsates, with a main cycle of about 400 days. There's also a much slower cycle of roughly six years, which astronomers have long tried to explain. In 2025, a team reported spotting a faint companion star very close to Betelgeuse, which could help account for that slow rhythm. Like a lot of Betelgeuse research, it's still being studied.

The Great Dimming

In late 2019, Betelgeuse started to fade. By February 2020, it had lost more than half of its usual brightness, enough that people could see the difference just by looking up. It's normally one of the brightest stars in the night sky, and suddenly it wasn't.

Because Betelgeuse will eventually explode, a lot of people wondered whether this was it. It wasn't. The star recovered over the following months.

Observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope pointed to an explanation. The dimming is now attributed largely to a dust cloud: Betelgeuse threw off a burst of gas, which cooled into dust and blocked part of its light from our point of view. A cooler patch on the star's surface likely contributed too.

Will it explode?

Yes, eventually. Massive stars live fast. Betelgeuse is thought to be only around ten million years old, compared with about 4.6 billion for the Sun, and it's already in the late stages of its life. When its core runs out of fuel it's expected to collapse and explode as a supernova.

Just don't wait up. It isn't expected to happen any time soon on human timescales. Estimates vary, but they're generally measured in tens of thousands of years or more, with around 100,000 years a commonly quoted figure.

When it does go, it should be bright enough to see in daylight for a while. Orion will lose a shoulder. Betelgeuse is also far too distant for the explosion to harm Earth.

A name with a typo in it

The name comes from Arabic. The usual account traces it to a phrase meaning "the hand of al-Jawzā'", a figure in the sky. In the medieval Latin transcription, the first letter was misread (in Arabic script, the letters for "y" and "b" differ only by their dots), producing "Bedalgeuze". Later scholars, working backwards, decided it must mean "armpit", and the spelling settled into Betelgeuse.

So the name of one of the most famous stars in the sky is, quite possibly, the product of a copying error and a confident guess. We find that oddly reassuring.

What this has to do with apps and games

Betelgeuse is a giant, but from here it's a single point of light. That's the part we care about. The things we make are small: an app, a keyboard, a puzzle game, a trivia game, a siege game. We want each one to be bright enough that you notice it, clear enough that you don't need a manual, and good enough to keep. Our tagline says it simply: apps and games that burn bright.

Here's what's lit up so far:

• Gattr turns recipe videos and links from TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and the web into clean recipe cards you can actually cook from.
• Rewritr is an iPhone keyboard that corrects, polishes and shortens your writing right where you type.
• Pin Pop is a glossy pull-the-pin physics puzzler with 100 hand-made levels.
• Scale It! is size-comparison trivia: resize landmarks, animals and planets to their true scale.
• Castle Boom is a castle siege on tank tracks: fire through ×10 and ×50 gates and bring the enemy fortress down.

Betelgeuse also reminds us of something useful. It's never quite the same from one year to the next. It pulses, it dims, it surprises the people watching it. We'd like our products to feel alive in the same way, with regular updates rather than launch-and-forget.

Look up tonight

On the next clear evening when Orion is up, find the belt, then look for the orange star at the shoulder. That's the one we named ourselves after. Then, if you're curious, come and see what we've built: start with our apps or our games.