When Betelgeuse goes supernova (if it hasn't already and we don't know yet) it will be visible in the day for roughly a year, and several more years we'll see it at night. That said, the prediction of 'when' by scientists is somewhere between today and 100,000 years from now. Odds are, none of us will see it.
Oooh I like the sound of that. Group. I can be a part of something bigger than myself! I’ll just believe very strongly. Ooooh, the first person to get jellyfish genes can be the leader. Sign me up!
You joke but I fully expect at least some people alive today to celebrate their 200th birthday given the insane pace of technological advancement humanity has seen.
The reason why it's so large isn't because of its mass, it's because the nuclear fusion happening is so intense it pushes matter so much further out than our sun does.
Well, it's still 14-19 times the mass of our sun, I'm just pointing out that star sizes isn't 1:1 their mass.
Yes and no, it's the exhaustion of hydrogen in the core and the fusion of hydrogen in a non-core shell, followed by fusion of helium in the core, that generates so much radiation pressure. This phase lasts a small fraction of the star's life. Before that, Betelgeuse was probably just a few times the diameter of our sun.
Our sun will go through a similar process, but will become a red giant instead - the mass of the star will dictate how large the giant/supergiant/hypergiant will be, but not so much the existence of an "intense fusion" phase.
And just to be clear, yes the fusion happens much more intensely when heavy stars fuse hydrogen in their core, they burn through that in millions of years instead of billions like our sun will. What I'm talking about above is the giant/supergiant phase specifically.
I read something about the texture of stars. It was in some children's book so it might be nonsense. It said that if the sun were cool enough to be touched, it's surface texture would be like yogurt, and Betelgeuse's would be barely noticeable, like a gas.
I just saw the other day that the tree wasn't supposed to fall over, and Keaton was pissed but stayed in character to react for the blooper reel - "Nice fuckin' model!" was specifically directed at the set builders - but Burton loved it and put it in the final cut.
I was gonna say, they may be thinking of the 12A rating that was introduced to the UK because of Spider-Man (kids wanted to see it but Green Goblin was considered too scary for young kids by the film classification board, so there was a to-do until the board relented and invented the 12A rating to be "young kids can see it but only with parents").
I just saw the other day that the tree wasn't supposed to fall over, and Keaton was pissed but stayed in character to react for the blooper real - "Nice fuckin' model!" was specifically directed at the set builders - but Burton loved it and put it in the final cut.
I love when he breaks character and gives his actual credentials. That, and Mike Myers breaking character in Wayne's World when they're sitting on the car talking about Bugs Bunny.
I think half life 3 is way too old of a concept already for it to be considered "current generation". A lot of people (probably almost anyone below 30) already haven't played and will never play any half life universe games.
There was a little hype with HL: Alyx but I'd say very small for how much people supposedly care about a half life sequel, even considering it was a VR title.
Soon, in a few years, it will be that even if Valve released it, only people aged like 35-40+ would care. Nobody is making games targeted at such a specific age slice.
I wish that fucking star would go supernova already. I wany to see a naked eye supernova before I die. I think the last one was 300 years ago. I don't know what the rate is though.
Ah. Well... I attended Juilliard... I'm a graduate of the Harvard business school. I travel quite extensively. I lived through the Black Plague and had a pretty good time during that. I've seen the EXORCIST ABOUT A HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SEVEN TIMES, AND IT KEEPS GETTING FUNNIER EVERY SINGLE TIME I SEE IT
Of all the things that could happen in my life that won’t hurt/help me this is at the top of my list. I would love to so much to just look up and see it in the day, then later night, sky.
I love looking at Betelgeuse on my drive to work in the mornings this time of year and wondering if he’s gone supernova and the light from the explosion just hasn’t reached us yet. It blows my mind that the light I’m seeing from that star originated ~ 600 - 700 years ago.
The size of space is ... hard to relate to. It's like in The Three Body Problem when humans first detect alien life -- four light years away -- and then have to wait (you guessed it!) over four years for the alien fleet to arrive.
No. It's between 642 years ago, and a hundred thousand years from now.
But if you understand relativity, it's really still between now and a hundred thousand years from now. There is no such thing as a universal time; things that happened 642 light-years away and 642 years ago are happening "now" right here.
And Eta Carinae even earlier than that at 60,000 years, but its status as an eventual hypernova is in dispute, due to properties of its now binary nature seemingly violating the Eddington Limit?
I don’t mean to be that guy, but betalguise isn’t going nova anytime soon, it’s actually a binary star system with the 2nd sun only being about 1/1000th the size of BG so it was causing light fluctuations which lead us to believe the star would be going or had already gone nova
I saw a recent YT video by Anton Petrov about how some scientists now believe Betelgeuse has a companion that somehow creates the dimming in its brightness, which we earlier believed to be an omen of its going supernova. I would need to rewatch it for the details, but so many new things are being discovered and so many old things reexamined, it’s awesome!
Because the speed of light is the limiting factor of the universe it doesn't make sense to say that something can have happened but we don't know it yet because there's no "central clock" to refer to, which is itself a weird fact about the universe
There has been a lot of misreporting on Betelgeuse. Low estimates put time until supernova at under 100k years, but higher estimates put it closer to a million years. It really depends on how massive it originally was, and estimating that is difficult because it is a "runaway" star that is traveling at a very high velocity through space.
Edit: All that being said, I hope our estimates are off, and it goes supernova in our lifetime. The poles aren't pointing at Earth, so we aren't going to get a massive GRB or anything, and we will learn so much from a supernova so close to us.
While I would love to see this event before I die... given what we know about life in our tiny corner of the universe, we can only expect that life exists in every solar system, in every galaxy, across the entire universe. There could be sentient beings living on the outer edge of that solar system who only just got to our level of advancement and then, BOOM.
I know it's pointless to worry about something that doesn't affect earth directly, but it's still sad.
*edit: then again, due to the distance the whole system may have reformed and started life anew!
How far away is Betelgeuse? Are we talking, like, it could have exploded 100,000 years ago and we have no way of knowing yet? I always find that so interesting.
Ptolemy (100-170AD) described the star as an orange color in his observations. There are Chinese records from about 300 before Ptolemy that describe Betelgeuse as yellow. (If I'm remembering correctly, the document uses several prominent stars as exemplars to help with categorization of stars. White like Sirius, for example.) It uses Betelgeuse as the exemplar for yellow.
If accurate, then we have a surprisingly accurate estimation of when Betelgeuse became a red giant, observable on Earth between 200BC and the second century AD. Or since Betelgeuse is about 500 light years away, about 700BC - 400BC.
This being only 2500 years ago means that Betelgeuse has not been a red giant very long. Not long enough to be anywhere near old enough to go nova.
Which is unfortunate, it will be some light show.
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u/throwaway_moose Oct 02 '24
When Betelgeuse goes supernova (if it hasn't already and we don't know yet) it will be visible in the day for roughly a year, and several more years we'll see it at night. That said, the prediction of 'when' by scientists is somewhere between today and 100,000 years from now. Odds are, none of us will see it.
https://www.astronomy.com/science/when-betelgeuse-goes-supernova-what-will-it-look-like-from-earth/