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?
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.
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-)
And that he has picked a more welcoming system to come back to than the first one dad sent him out to.
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.
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.
This may be the related to Artor @ #4. It’s in Scientific American and may be behind their paywall:
Behold, the Mind-Blowing Bubbles of Betelgeuse
Giant bubbles erupting across this red supergiant star’s surface could solve a lingering astrophysical mystery
@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.
“ 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
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!?
@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.
Orion’s armpit according to some translations.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/betelgeuse/
Oh, come on.
Don’t tell me this is not about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetlejuice_Beetlejuice
@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 :
Source : https://www.space.com/betelgeuse-photosphere-dimming-dust-cold-spot (October 2023.)
Plus :
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)
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.
Also according tosome translations notably from Kaler’s excellent stars webiste :
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 :
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..
^ .. much smaller companion star to Beteleguese that is.
oh no! this post has Betelgeuse THREE times in the title!
now Tim Burton is going to destroy Betelgeuse!!111!11!