Is Betelgeuse about to blow? (going supernova in weeks or just another breathless rumor?)

DiscoverMagazine ^ | 6/01/10 | Phil Plait

[Star Traveler]

An anonymous poster there says he has heard that the star Betelgeuse is about to go supernova, maybe as soon as a few weeks:

Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away (give or take 140 light years) -- so, if it blows up next week, you won't know it for another 640 years ... LOL ...

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks LibWhacker!

Phil Plait: This is a huge star, and when it goes, it will be at least as bright as that 1054 supernova...except that this one is 520 light years away, not 6,300 [...] When it collapses, it will be at least as bright as the full moon, and maybe as bright as the sun. For six weeks. So the really lucky folks (for whom Betelgeuse is only visible at night) will get 24 hour days, everybody else will get at least some time with two suns in the sky... Probably, all we'll get is visible light (not gamma rays or X-rays), so it shouldn't be an ELE [Extinction Level Event]... this is weeks/months away... Betelgeuse is one of the brightest stars in the sky... something like 100,000 times that of the Sun... roughly 600 light years away... a mass of something like 20 times the Sun's... Betelgeuse might go up tonight, or it might not be for 100,000 years. We're just not sure... a lot of stuff can happen on the surface of the star that has nothing to do with the core... what's happening on the surface is not an indication of any impending explosion... A supernova has to be no farther than about 25 light years away to be able to fry us with light or anything else, and Betelgeuse is 25 times that distance (which means it's power to hurt us is weakened by over 600x). It's the wrong kind of star to explode as a gamma-ray burst, so I'm not worried about that either... it'll get bright, about as bright as the full Moon. That's pretty bright! It'll hurt your eyes to look at it, but that's about it.

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[SunkenCiv]

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The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes: Flood, Fire, and Famine in the History of Civilization by Richard Firestone, Allen West, and Simon Warwick-Smith

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[SunkenCiv]

Thanks LibWhacker.

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[SunkenCiv]

Thanks LibWhacker.

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[wastedyears]

Well in reality, it would have exploded millions of years ago, and we’re just getting a glimpse now of what happened long ago.

Funny, that light.

[LonePalm]

Perhaps they are seeing an increasing iron line in the spectrometry. That is a dead give away that a star won't be around long.

Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)

[dr_who]

More importantly...has Obama been briefed about it, and does he have his teleprompter ready?

[FARS]

Relevance to the Mayan calendar came to my mind too while reading the story.

Alignment of sun, planet earth and a black hole

[stayathomemom]

I had an astronomy professor, Robert Kirshner, when I was at U of M whose specialty was supernovae. I remember him saying joyfully that we were "due" for one based on the odds of how frequently they appear. He was a great lecturer, by the way.

[xp38]

Beyond Antares

The skies are green and glowing
Where my heart is
Where my heart is
Where....the scented lunar flower is blooming
Somewhere, beyond the stars
Beyond Antares

I’ll be back though it takes forever
Forever is just a day.
Forever is just another journey
Tomorrow a stop along the way

And let the years go fading
Where my heart is
Where my heart is
Where my love eternally is waiting
Somewhere, beyond the stars
Beyond Antares

[Red Steel]

Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away (give or take 140 light years) -- so, if it blows up next week, you won't know it for another 640 years ... LOL ...

I'm sure he meant 639 years and 51 weeks ago plus another week. Oh yeah...

LoL!

[BenKenobi]

What? Kepler’s star? Interesting story there.

We’ll be extremely lucky to be around for one in this galaxy.

[rdl6989]

Somehow I knew the Beetlejuice jokes were coming. :D

[Richard Kimball]

Yeah, I read that also. Who wrote this article, Lisa Douglas?

Remember, Ruth is a stranger to friction.

[Blood of Tyrants]

Truthfully, the “end” of the Mayan calendar is no end at all. It is simply the end of their calendar counting cycle.

[ETL]

Do you have a link to that excerpt you posted? Looks like it might be from Wiki.

[Natural Born 54]

So the really lucky folks (for whom Betelgeuse is only visible at night) will get 24 hour days

Anybody know what part of the earth will get 24 hours of daylight?

[Fred Hayek]

With that size and being 20 solar masses, it looks like maybe Betelgeuse is at the end of its helium burning phase. Typically a main sequence star of 8 solar masses will end of life blow off enough mass so that it would be under the Chadrasekhar limit of 1.4 solar masses, so it will end its life as a white dwarf. Above the limit, the gravitaional collapse exceeds the electron degeneracy pressure, thus a neutron star or even black hole is formed, depending on the mass of the remnant. Now the question is will the star undergo further fusion reactions, such as carbon-oxygen? Such reactions are very short lived, and result in further explosions. These explosions distribute a lot of heavy elements (in cosmology BTW, anything helium and above is considered to be a “metal”).

[American Constitutionalist]

What ever observations are being taken now, any light that is seen now from it took 500 years to get here.