Hey Terry! Very honored to have you stop by my post and comment. I have seen the latests SPHERE imagery and found that dust cloud worth looking at. I think Betelgeuse's current dimming is a combination of that dust cloud and a rather large, powerful and dominant convection cell thats taking its time shuttling the energy and luminosity to Betelgeuse's surface. I dont think its the core getting ready to go. I think Betelgeuse has a good amount of time left before it fuses silicon especially if it actually turns out to be feeding off a companion like Wheeler's team believes. He has a new report coming out on it pretty soon. Will be interesting to see whats in it.

Anyways, glad you stopped by and I thank you.