so, tldr: Betelgeuse probably isn’t exploding any time soon, but there’s some really cool physics that explains why it’s getting dimmer!!
Giant Star That’s Acting Strange Could Explode Soon, Scientists Say
Shutterstock/IgorZh
The Constellation Orion may look very different soon if astronomers are right about the giant star Betelgeuse which marks the starry hunter’s right shoulder.
Betelgeuse was once in among the top 10 brightest stars in the night sky, but since October it’s been dimming so much that it’s no longer even in the top 20, according to The Astronomer’s Telegram. This is remarkable for a star that is 20 times more massive than our sun.
This reduction in brilliance is significant because the dimming of a star often foreshadows an incredibly bright, explosive conclusion to the life of a stellar body in the form of a supernova, according to National Geographic.
If Betelgeuse were to go supernova, it would put on a show for the ages as it collapses into itself and detonates. From earth, this event would be clearly observable, briefly outshining even a full moon in our night sky before going dark forever, reports National Geographic. (RELATED: The PC Speech Police Are Coming For Space Colonies)
“Betelgeuse is living on borrowed time and could explode as a supernova any day now,” Fraser Cain, publisher of Universe Today explained recently on his YouTube channel. However, he also noted that it “might not detonate for another 100,000 years, we just don’t know.”
Sarafina Nance who studies Betelgeuse at the University of California Berkeley agrees that the red giant is slated to explode, but is convinced we’ll have to wait another 100,000 years or so to behold such a spectacle.
Sarafina Nance@starstrickenSFfor those asking: when Betelgeuse *does* explode, it’ll be a super bright moon-like light in our sky. it’ll fade over the course of a few months, but will be a gorgeous spectacle as it does. no danger to earth— we just get to marvel its beauty.
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Fortunately, Cain, Nance and others all agree that the eventual demise of Orion’s shoulder poses no danger to Earth.
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Tom O
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Quote –
“This reduction in brilliance is significant because the dimming of a star often foreshadows an incredibly bright, explosive conclusion to the life of a stellar body in the form of a supernova, according to National Geographic.”
We have been observing the heavens through telescopes for a few hundred years, I would guess. And they have been observed mostly by a few thousand astronomers. And there are only estimated billions of billions of stars “out there” in the universe, yet we can make such a bold statement as that quote. “Often” suggests a lot more than a few here and there “that we actually observed,” if any, actually. Thus, we arrive at this broad statement through simulations and models, no doubt.
The possibility – even the probability of their suggest being correct is likely correct, but it is the tenor of expert knowledge based on minimal observation that always amuses me. Sort of like using mathematical models to accurately predict the rotation of a galaxy just observed at the limits of the best telescope available, its composition, its likely number of stars, whether or not it has “star making regions,” the dust cloud co-rotating with it, its approximate age, and the list goes on. All this from a blurry patch in a photo that is photoshopped by information gleaned from nearer galaxies to “flesh out” the blurry blob by AI. It is amazing how far down the path of simulation mathematics and computers have taken us. And it doesn’t matter which science you consider, except maybe chemistry, which is pretty much based in the physical universe.
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Andy Rowlands
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It will be interesting if old Battlegoose goes go off in our lifetimes, but whevever it does, we should detect the burst of neutrinos like we did after SN1987A went off.
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