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Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse

Something funny is going on 650 light years away…or should I use the past tense? Something funny was going on 650 years ago. The star Betelgeuse is/was acting up, dimming and then brightening (well, it’s always been flickering a bit, but this was a greater reduction in brightness than usual.) And now some people are saying it’s about to go supernova! There is a real-time deathwatch on YouTube. “LIVE Betelgeuse Supernova Explosion Is Finally HAPPENING NOW!” it says.

That’s a bit much, and I hope no one is staring at a YouTube page hoping to catch the instant when a rare cosmic event happens. You might be waiting a lifetime. Or maybe seeing it in the next few minutes, but not likely.

Here’s a less sensationalistic perspective.

“Our best models indicate that Betelgeuse is in the stage when it’s burning helium to carbon and oxygen in its core,” Morgan MacLeod, a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical astrophysics at Harvard University and lead author of a recent study about Betelgeuse’s Great Dimming, told Space.com. “That means it’s still tens of thousands or maybe a hundred thousand years from exploding, if those models are correct.”

Awww, but it sounds like it will be spectacular when we do get the Giant Space Kablooiee, and not spectacularly dangerous, the best kind of spectacular there is.

“When it happens, the star will become as bright as the full moon, except that it will be concentrated in a single point,” Montargès said. “For maybe two months, it will be so bright that if you shut down all the lights in a city and have no clouds, you would be able to read a book in the light of the supernova. It will be so bright that it will be visible in the daylight, too. There will be another star shining in the sky during the day.”

Fortunately, although close enough to provide such a spectacle, Betelgeuse is too far away from Earth for its explosion to be dangerous to us. Astronomers think that a giant star would have to blow up within 160 light-years from our planet for us to feel the explosion’s effect, according to EarthSky.

Don’t get your hopes up, though. I do wonder if that guy running the live video feed is prepared to keep it going for 10,000 years. How can you be interested in astronomy and not be aware of the scale of the events you’re interested in?

You must remember this: our opponents aren’t particularly bright » « Oh no! Please don’t send Chaya Raichik on tour!

Comments

  1. says

    I thought this was going to be about a supernova of crybabies exploding about how they made a “woke” remake of the old movie. I should have noticed you spelled it the star way, not the bug fluids way.

    I’ll put this on my calendar as “astronomically imminent,” which doesn’t say much for a mayfly monkey like me.

  2. billseymour says

    I guess I won’t live to see it.  Too bad.  It would be fun to see all the fundies ranting about how the “new” star in the sky portends the second coming of Jesus. 8-)

  3. muttpupdad says

    And that he has picked a more welcoming system to come back to than the first one dad sent him out to.

  4. Artor says

    It would be very cool to see Betelgeuse go boom in my lifetime, but the latest I have read indicates that the dimming is simply an artifact of the star’s atmosphere violently boiling with convection cells the size of planetary orbits, and belching clouds of dust. It could keep that up for centuries to come, or minutes. Who knows? The more immediate thing to watch is T Coronae Borealis, found near the bright star Arcturus. This is a recurrent nova that goes off every 80 years, and is on track to detonate this year, anytime between now and September. At around 3000 light years away, it won’t be nearly as spectacular as Betelgeuse, but should be visible to the naked eye for a week or two when it blows.

  5. says

    As an avid amateur astronomer, I’m conflicted. The over sensationalization of astronomy events might get some people to look up and take notice, but 95% of those will be sorely disappointed and never look up again, which is just sad. I’m talking about the naming of every damned full moon for some reason and other crap that people are just making up for, of course, social media attention. Even the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a lot of unrealistic composites that have no basis in reality.

  7. Dennis K says

    @5 drksky — Between moon-naming and APOD’s descent into clickbait, very few notice the incredible science pouring from the JWST. In my unfortunate circle of idiots (i.e. mostly family), most don’t know what this “JWST” contraption even is.

  8. cormacolinde says

    “ 650 light years away…or should I use the past tense? Something funny was going on 650 years ago”

    Those two statements mean exactly the same thing, since we are talking about light.

  9. Rich Woods says

    Clearly the forthcoming solar eclipse is a portent of the T Coronae Borealis recurrent nova, which in turn is an omen foretelling the Betelgeuse supernova, that itself is warning us of the imminent collapse of American democracy when all the fuckwitted ignoramuses who believe this shit vote for Trump.

  10. tacitus says

    “LIVE Betelgeuse Supernova Explosion Is Finally HAPPENING NOW!”

    It would be hilarious if the moment the explosion triggered happened during an ad break…

    (Yeah, I know, in reality, the initial neutrino burst would give us enough warning to kill ads for the day.)

  11. says

    Are people expected a visual effect like the exploding Deathstar from Star Wars? They’ll be disappointed.

    The supernova event isn’t visible except in very superficial terms, and lasts for a month to a year, since it consists of gas around the star getting heated to incandescence and cooling down again. That video isn’t going to be exciting even if the neutrinos were detected tomorrow.

    It’s exciting to scientists because we have instruments besides visual light detectors pointed at the thing.

  12. birgerjohansson says

    After Kepler’s supernova, there has probably been a few events completely obscured by the dust in the plane of the Milky way. But as neutrino detectors only became a thing in the last half century we never noticed anything.

    Maybe a supernova in the Andromeda galaxy will go off in the next decades. It will not be spectacular, but at least it will be something

  13. gijoel says

    It’s pissing down rain where I am, so it’s guaranteed to happen today.

    When it does go off, I’m sure some bible fondler will blame it on minorities, or the woke.

  14. map61 says

    Don’t get your hopes up, though. I do wonder if that guy running the live video feed is prepared to keep it going for 10,000 years.

    Can you imagine the monetization on that!?

  15. StevoR says

    @12. birgerjohansson : Yes, there’s thought to be several that we might have missed despite being in our galaxy notably Cassiopiae A in 1680 possibly seen by Flamsteed and charted as 3 Cas see :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiopeia_A#Possible_observations

    Plus G1.9+0.3 see :

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G1.9%2B0.3

    Personally I’m rather hping Eta Carinae blows up in my lifetime. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae ) Its already produced asupernovae imposter event inthe Great Eruptionof 1840 and I’d love to see what happens with its end. I’d also kinda miss Betelgeux if it blows up.

  18. StevoR says

    @16. Silentbob : Yup.

    @Artor : “he latest I have read indicates that the dimming is simply an artifact of the star’s atmosphere violently boiling with convection cells the size of planetary orbits, and belching clouds of dust. It could keep that up for centuries to come, or minutes. Who knows?

    Dunno for sure but astronomers are certainkly working on it and have plenty of ideas like :

    Can a star bounce back from the verge of death? One star did — or at least appeared to. In early 2019, the red supergiant Betelgeuse began to dim. Some observers predicted that the dimming was a harbinger of the star’s end: That it was the first warning sign that Betelguese was about to go supernova. Astronomers are now certain that isn’t true. Images released by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) on Monday (Oct. 23) clearly show Betelguese returned to normal after the event. … (Snip)..Although the star as a whole appeared to darken, Betelgeuse’s photosphere seemed to actually brighten during the event. The Université Côte d’Azur astronomers say this observation is consistent with a likely theory, supported by observations, that Betelgeuse dimmed from our view due to a burst of dust, in the form of silicon monoxide, coming from the star. In turn, that burst might be related to a sudden cooling of the star’s surface. “The changes in the structure of the photosphere and the silicon monoxide are consistent with both the formation of a cold spot on the star’s surface and the ejection of a cloud of dust,” the statement reads.

    Source : https://www.space.com/betelgeuse-photosphere-dimming-dust-cold-spot (October 2023.)

    Plus :

    In late 2019, the star Betelgeuse dimmed by about 60%. While it’s impossible to say with certainty exactly what caused it, new research suggests that a wandering companion may have played a role. By swinging close to the giant star, the interloper may have raised a tidal bulge, causing the surface of Betelgeuse to dim. While this scenario can’t explain the full amount of dimming observed, it may have triggered other effects on the star that made the problem worse, researchers propose in a new paper.

    Source : https://www.space.com/betelgeuse-great-dimming-passing-star-explained

    In addition to and among others the more hopeful for the final Betelgexite big bang Dr becky’s clip “New study claims Betelgeuse supernova IMMINENT (decades not centuries)

  19. weylguy says

    Thanks for the update, Dr. Myers, but now I have to get back to YouTube to watch the supernova, which is going to happen any second now.

  20. StevoR says

    Also according tosome translations notably from Kaler’s excellent stars webiste :

    The name Betelgeuse is a corruption of the Arabic “yad al jauza,” which means the “hand of al-jauza,” al-jauza the ancient Arabs’ “Central One,” a mysterious woman. For us, it marks the upper left hand corner of the figure of the Greek’s ancient hunter (and since he depicted is facing you, his right shoulder).

    Source : http://stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/betelgeuse.html

    Remarkably they once thought a much companion star to Betelgeux actually orbited inside it at least partly although this no longer seems the case :

    A star inside a star. A 1986 studyby three Harvard-Smithsonian astronomers gave evidence for a companion star orbiting the famous red (super- ed)giant Betelgeuse .. (snip).. Their data suggest that this close companion is inan elliptical orbit that dips inside the red glowing outermost atmospherer of Betelgeuse. In one interpreation (pictured here) the companion star could be a blue-white companion of a few solar masses. Such a system could form when the red giant expands and engulfs part of the orbit of the second star. The system would last only a short tim, astronomically speaking, since drag forces, willcause the second star eventually to plunge far intothe giant and to merge with it.

    Page 36, Çycles of Fire’ , William K Hartmann & Ron Miller, Workman Publishing, 1987.

    Unfortunately this is the only time this idea gets mentioned so I presume it was since disproven or at least not accepted. However I do like that thought I guess it could well happen with other red supergiants given their exceedingkly thin outer atmospheres which ahev been described as red hot vacuums.

    We also think now that many supergiant extremely large stars form through mergers of close massive binary star systems so maybe far in the past it was two stars – or even more..

  22. Robbo says

    oh no! this post has Betelgeuse THREE times in the title!

    now Tim Burton is going to destroy Betelgeuse!!111!11!