It’s showing loss of mass. It could flare up to give us a display. No danger to Earth: it’s quite far from us. But, hey, talk about life imitating art—see the geologic history of the Seeking North scenario.
Betelgeuse may be imploding.
by CJ | Jan 21, 2011 | Journal | 25 comments
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http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/01/21/will-the-earth-have-two-suns-by-2012/?hpt=T2
Could Sir Arthur C. Clarke have been onto something when he wrote 2010?
I recall they were talking about stars imploding, and that Betelgeuse was one of the ones they discussed. They said, for all they knew, it might have already imploded, but we wouldn’t know it immediately, because it’s 500 ly away.
Oh wow! I’m keeping my fingers crossed (pro-explosion).
Bad Astronomy looked at this: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/01/is-betelgeuse-about-to-blow/
First sign of trouble: it’s a third-hand unsourced story.
oooh, I like Bad Astronomy! thanks for that! 😀
My tame astrophysicist was rather damming about the entire article. She tore the source article to bits them jumped up and down on the bits. The wander off muttering darkly under her breath about bad science.
@Apf, wow….I’d hate to see her when she’s really unleashed.
too bad, it would be a spectacular thing to see
Whether or not it’s good science, it makes for one helluva storyline…
Well, and when you try to figure out its distance, it’s anywhere from 180 to 1300 light years away: this points up a problem with observations of this star: most everything we know about it is contingent on which distance estimate you believe (cartoon astronomer surveying bug on the lens of his telescope)—so it’s possible. It’s not a given. Whatever did go on happened during Darwin’s voyage and the same year the first wagon crossed the Rocky Mountains on the move west—or happened any time as far back as the Dark Ages in Europe, amid the Viking Raids on England, and centuries before Columbus or even the Norman Invasion of England. That’s a fair bit of imprecision, which makes a large cone of uncertainty about other measurements. We know it’s big. We know it’s red. We do not know if it’s still there—it’s that speed of light thing.
And if we did have it firmly nailed down—even so, from ‘losing mass’ to ‘imploding’ is still a big uncertain time that could be next second to next millenium or so.
So don’t plan on suntanning at midnight!
But I’ll bet the news release makes a lot of people learn a lot more about Betelgeuse!
Not totally true. Something is still going to be there, even if it doesn’t look like what we can see right now.
That’s true. It’d be very interesting to observe, whatever’s gone on. The other big guy to watch would be Antares. Probably these super big guys are just weird, anyway. Not to mention Sirius, which is one, if they tell me it’s going, I’m digging my basement deeper. 😉
I’ve always been Sirius about astronomy 🙂
Joking aside, there’s so many neat things out there. I’m an addict when it comes to following Exoplanets, Black Holes, etc.
Not with the Mantis, I hope!
LOL!
I’m trying to remember which astrophysicist said it was 500 ly away. This was on an episode of “The Universe” on The History Channel. Now, I know that the History Channel plays fast and loose with certain events/timelines, etc., but I don’t believe that any astrophysicist who has his name and his affiliation on the screen is going to want to embarrass themselves and their place of employment by not reporting factual data, or as precisely factual as they can make it. I thought they used something like the “relative candle” technique, but I might be mistaken on that, too.
That’ll teach ’em to stay up till all hours, partying with wild women and strange men, smoking and drinking and playing their holographic stereo cranked up to 11!
You don’t even want to know about the cable bill!
Hah, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to move in here, they’d better pay rent and keep up the place.
None of that spoiled milk, either! This is a classy establishment.
Heh. Be a heck of a note to send a probe, only to find out they blew up the neighborhood to put in an interstellar highway.
A few hundred years or lightyears is quite a range. Could make stellar navigation a bit exciting.
The story is definitely making the rounds of the internet: at one point this afternoon, my spouse called out excitedly from the computer, “Hey, Betelgeuse may explode!” to which I had to sadly reply, “no, CJ’s blog as already pointed us to the Bad Astronomy website.” Both of us are dissappointed.
Transplanted from another site I visit: me: “If you want to understand what it would be to experience interstellar flight, you have only to consider that various locations in space have differing information: for instance, if the star HAD blown in 740 AD, we would have to be much closer to it to see it, and within light-minutes of it (and in danger!) to witness it happening. Meanwhile, as it blew, we would be looking back on a Sun that had a planet experiencing the Vikings in Europe and the Tang Dynasty in China, and who would not know our situation, or get our ‘laser-radio’ report for centuries, simultaneous with the bright light in Earthly skies. As Einstein reported, Time and Space have a great deal interesting to say to each other, and the more you know about one reality, the further off you are from another. Time is what really happened. Space is how far you are from knowing it. So in some sense Time and Space as we define them are interchangeable—but it may be that our language doesn’t yet contain the concepts necessary to express a no-longer-contingent-futurity: a future-certainty, which is immutable history to another viewpoint.”
I hope we still live when it happens (arrives here)…. Just to see it in the sky! =)
On the other hand, in the department of real astronomy, there’s this story
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-aurigae-star-20110120,0,5403794.story
about an astronomer studying Epsilon Aurigae. It changes in brightness, but it doesn’t seem to be an eclipsing binary.
May be of interest on Earth:
Yellowstone National Park’s supervolcano just took a deep “breath,” causing miles of ground to rise dramatically, scientists report.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110119-yellowstone-park-supervolcano-eruption-magma-science/
We DO keep a weather eye on Yellowstone, up here, for sure! Good article!
this is more fun than all of that. each year, they have a little contest among the research labs at baylor in houston. this lab generally wins.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4L4M8m4d0&feature=player_embedded