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Could Betelgeuse Go Boom?
An anonymous reader writes "The answer is No. In space, nobody can hear you scream. However, it might go supernova in the near future, if it hasn't already. I wanna see that, even if it would permanently disfigure Orion. Ka freaking bam!"
Boom!
It's probably gonna blow the next time Lydia yells Betelgeuse 3 times.
How could it permanently disfigure Orion? Can't you just say its name three times and have it pop right back?
Well, time to duck now.
Global warming.
#DeleteChrome
That is one heck of a summary. I really like how a line and a half of text is qualifying as a story these days.
Is it THAT slow of a news day, or could no one else possibly outdo this clown of a submitter?
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Its showtime
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
The anonymous reader is wrong. A supernova would be accompanied by a large amount of shockwaves through the star, and a large amount of pressure waves. There would be no sound, in the sense that there would be no neurological interpretations of these phenomena, but they would still happen.
This constellation ain't big enough for two nebulae!
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
It's 640 light years away (give or take). Would the neutrinos affect us at all? Is this another doomsday scenario? I would imagine that it'd be hellishly bright in the night sky. What does science say about it? I'm rusty on my astronomy, but it'd be awesome to see.
Things will DIE!!!!
What if it happened to you're solar system.
The yield of such a gamma ray blast might x-ray and bake us pretty nicely, but it might be distant enough, hopefully.
For all of us so far its part of a sight that has never changed as much as the naked eye could tell, and yet to have it possibly change... it would be cool to see, but disappointing at the same time. What I'm wondering now is not how this will affect us, but how it would affect the potential life forms out in that area of the universe, if any at all... to someone or something out there is this the end of all life as they know it? the start of a new change if the ability to move civilizations has become a reality for them? or will this be just a dot in everyone's night sky that goes out, only to be recorded in history, but never having too much of an effect on anything major?
There was supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!
No, sorry, not likely to be a in death throes, TFA states it is a potato shaped star that rotates every 18 years, thus it's likely an illusion.
... is it??
Not big enough and close enough to be a hazard to us?
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Would be a very interesting sight to see to be sure.
My understanding is that the axis on which it spins would not force any gamma rays towards Earth's direction so it would amount to a light show and the loss of a landmark star, without danger to us.
A supernova that close would probably afford us a great deal of insight into things we aren't sure about hopefully in this generation.
Good, No one liked that movie anyway.
"That's BeetleJuice not Betelgeuse you Anonymous Bastard!"
Oh, well I stand corrected. Carry on. Nothing to see here.
... new here. ;-)
So Ford Prefect would have his home planet's neighbour explode, too? (He comes from a planet somewhere around Betelgeuse) Pity.
...rippling bands across the ground from atmospheric turbulence, razor-sharp shadows everywhere, with prominent diffraction rings around the ones from faraway objects. And a flaming rainbow streak, blue at the top, shading down through green to red, as it rises or sets in a clear sky.
If my calculations are right, it won't burn your eyes; it would be roughly equivalent to looking into a 4-microwatt laser, not nearly strong enough to be dangerous. A 10-inch telescope could collimate it into a 5-mW beam, bright enough to see passing through the air, if only it were dark outside. The Palomar reflector would collect closer to 2 watts, enough to start fires and such.
If it happened this month, most everybody north of the Antarctic Circle would be cruelly cheated. Any time from August through April, though, it should be visible in the night sky from just about anywhere but that same Antarctic. And yes, I'd be willing to drag myself out of bed pre-dawn for this.
Let's hope Zaphod or Ford weren't visiting relatives at the time.
I hope this doesn't mess up his home too much
Xaotik Designs
I hope this doesn't interfere with the Green Orion Women Slave Trade from Star Trek...
Astronomer's have confirmed it wasn't actually a supernova it was just Disaster Area tuning up for their gig tonight 600 years ago.
...are candidates
You get a lot of talk about how spectacular Eta Carinae would be if it went up. There's already been a Supernova "imposter" event... ..and here's some analysis of whether it's a danger. ...or has done so already
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/answers/snrisks.txt
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/246576/files/th-6805-93.ps.gz
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
There are some jokes in the Hitchhiker's trilogy that are hard to get, but this one from the Restaurant took me the longest:
"Did you know," interrupting the ghostly figure, fixing Zaphod with a stern look, "that Betelgeuse Five has developed a very slight eccentricy in its orbit?"
So DNA was just joking about the impeding nova, giving a clue in the disturbances it would cause in its planets' orbits.
Shit, I feel dumb.
entropy happens
Somebody ought to go through back issues of the New Sensationalist and look at all of their predictions or reports of great inventions or processes "that will be commercialized in two or three years" to see what their track record is. I wonder if they can live up to the standards set by astrologers.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
We've known for some time now that Betelgeuse is a red supergiant, and we have also known that the red supergiant phase of a star's life only lasts roughly one million years, tops. Being that Betelgeuse is a few million years old, we can deduce that it may be well into it's red supergiant phase, and given that it is 600 light-years away, it is possible that the star has already gone super-nova (type II) and the resulting light from the blast has not yet reached us. Now I understand that the article is saying the star appears to be shrinking, however the star (like any red supergiant) has a history of expanding and contracting. Per the article, it could be any number of things. I really don't think it is anything to get worked up about. Not that sensationalism isn't fun.
Betelgeuse is awesome and very, very pretty - I'd hate for it to turn into another colour or vanish altogether. Isn't there someone we could petition to stop this?
nt
If it's going to go boom, expect the signs of it to arrive in 2012 to coincide with other endings predicted for that year. And expect this to be a total insult to the Egyptian Pharaohs who seemed to revere that star above just about all else.
Are we really sure we're far enough away to be safe? I've heard before that a supernova even dozens of lightyears away would be a very bad thing for Earth.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Wasn't Ford's planet already blown up or something? Now his star system is going down the drain... that guy must have both the worst and best luck in a fictional universe.
It's likely that sound can be detected in space with the use of laser microphones. The sound won't be conducted through space, but that doesn't mean the ejecta isn't quivering, or that the quivering can't be neurologically assimilated.
Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse, Betelgeuse!
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
Never got to see a bright supernova but I do lament the loss of Orion. I chose Orion as part of my business name, and the logo even includes the three central stars: Mintaka, Al Nilam and Al Nitak. Got to love the old Arabic names of things.
Douglas Adams recorded a brief history of this catastrophe... It is only now in the near future that the light will reach Earth and that we may observe with our antiquated electromagnetic telescopes.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
640 light years? That ought to be enough for anybody.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
However that doesn't mean that there aren't things that /. should fix. Your post is a case in point, a helpful realist perspective on the situation, but because you posted AC it stands at score 0, while the comment 'Having "journal pages" was bad enough.' unbelievably stands at score 2. The cause? Very simple, AC's start moderated at 0 instead of 1, which means even most moderators will not see them, so often they don't get moderated up even if they're good, or only after most readers have moved to the next story. /.'s moderation system is one big argument from authority. Which is a logical fallacy, so I guess it shouldn't surprise us that it yields disagreeable results. After all, if a post is good, it should be able to stand on itself, and it shouldn't have to depend on the reputation of the poster. Never mind the associated webforum reputation drama, which is less pronounced on /. than elsewhere, but still something I would rather do without entirely. And then there are comments which are more wisely made AC to begin with. /. has no moderation. It is really that bad. And there's a really simple solution. Why doesn't /. implement it? Is it really to encourage people to register? Well, given that most interesting comments are still, years since I first started to read /., made AC, I think we can safely say that it isn't working.
Unfortunately, there is no a priori reason to assume comments from logged in users are necessarily better. I've been here quite some years and members also troll, flame, post incorrect stuff, inane crap, and so on.
Anyway, to tie this rant up, to see the most interesting posts in a thread, you'd probably (statistically speaking) have to either browse unmoderated and be confronted with all the noise, or you'd have to click all the "n replies omitted" links and possibly still be confronted with the noise.
We are speaking in galactic terms? How much it takes a star (of size/class/whatever) of Betelgeuse to go from whenever is now (from our point of view, at least), to supernova? This month? this year? this century? or the next millenium? All seems to be waiting to hit us tomorrow, and mankind could be extinct for long by when that star explodes.
However, it might go supernova in the near future, if it hasn't already
It hasn't already, because we haven't seen it go boom yet. Even if it is half a millennium away in terms of light travel time, from our frame of reference it will only go boom when we observe it to.
The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
[Betelgeuse] might go supernova in the near future
Might blow in the near future? Or might have blown a few million years ago and we could find out soon?
From what I understand, a grb from less than 3500 light years away would destroy the ozone layer.
In your calculations you forgot the small factoid that it may be another thousand years before it goes supernova. It has brightened considerably in the past only to dim back down. It was Fox news (fair and balanced) that mentions it going supernova, not the paper presented at the meeting that merely states a 15% shrinkage and nothing else.
So,you might would have to drag/dig yourself out of the ground to see the Betelgeuse supernova. And most zombies I know about are more interested in brains than astronomy...
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I saw it! The fat red giant said to the red dwarf "Oi bro! you're perturbing my orbit".
The dwarf star said 'Nah man, I didn't for shit, eh' and the other one goes: 'I will call on my fully sick planets, eh'. And then underwent gravitational collapse and chk-chk ka-boom!
If this were a common occurrence for the earth, it is very likely we would not be here at all.
Maybe it is very unlikely. Us being here does not prove otherwise. Maybe the earth is destroyed every thousand years, on average.
In a miniscule percentage of alternative universes, people notice the planet has been safe for millions of years.
In the other worlds, nobody thinks anything.
Voodoo priest sprinkles dust on Beetle Juice's head, and it starts shrinking. "Whoa. WHOA. WHOOOOOOOA! Hey, it's a new look for me."
OK, I read the article. It says that the star has been shrinking and mentions a few hypothesis.
None of them say anything about nova - super or otherwise.
Some of the comments on the article do.
Could we fire the editor? Please?
I think Townes and his team are excited because it gives a chance to look at a real supernova rockstar, or it's progression at least; if it happens at all.
Headline: Could Betelgeuse Go Boom?
First line of summary: The answer is No.
Seriously, why would I need to read beyond that first sentence.
Should have paid more attention to that hrung. What is a hrung anyway? And why does it have to collapse on Betelgeuse?
i wished i could see our sun go supernova :(
i mean once we are all gone, and we could say a final goodbye to this place.
when that day comes when i am long gone into dust, but that day i would be truly happy :P
as my molecules will always live on, i hope my molecules enjoy the ride :D (what an absurd thing to say, but we are immortal trough our mortality).
Head shot!
*TOENGGG*
For one thing, Space isn't a total vacuum, but explosions like this would send huge amounts of gas shooting out in every direction. When this gas hits something, you'd get the sound of the explosion through the vibrations.
You'd see the explosion, then, depending on the distance, a few minutes later when you get hit by the shockwave, you'd hear the sound. I've only ever seen one Scifi show/film which dealt with space explosions in this way; Starship Operators (they destroy a ship in a battle then get hit by the shockwave where they hear explosion and also the screams of all the people being killed in it).
"The answer is No. In slashdot, nobody reads TFA. However, it might go gaga in the near future, if it hasn't already. I wanna see that, even if it would permanently disfigure the Internets. Ka freaking bla!"
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
I think the editors or owners of Slashdot are either 1) Trying to increase viewership by appealing to a lowest denominator (Star go boom! Big word scary! Chemicals are mean! Vroom vroom car!) or 2) Trying to deliberately weaken the readership for purposes I can only speculate that. That second theory is bolstered by the clumsy rolling out of 'features' during the past few weeks - breaking things that once worked, adding new features that don't, and in general doing their best to make the site almost more trouble to read than it's worth.
Does anyone else have any suggestions or inside information? It's almost a meme now that 'Slashdot is self-sabotauging', but lately it's just gotten noticibly worse.
Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.
- Napolean Bonaparte
*Obligatory Spoiler Warning*
Upon reading the summary, I was immediately reminded of the book Calculating God. In it, the star Betelgeuse goes supernova and starts an end of the world scenario here on Earth. Where in, us and a few other alien races in the this sector of the Milky Way are saved by "god."
I failed to notice that on the frost piss, but saw it somewhere below. I thought "wow, look at this mean hax0r, he's got his own anonymous handle on Slashdot". It turns out it's just Slashdot farting once again. How disappointing.
This is one of those times where I am reminded that the vast amount of time and distance involved in any event like this make it most difficult to prepare for. Assume for the sake of argument that we know some event like this could truly destroy the human race (or at the very least do something very malicious to the vast majority of us and our environment). Now, how do we, as a species, go about preparing? If the star has already exploded, we'll have no way of knowing until the light has traveled X number of light years. Thus any preparations we might make could very well be in vain and terribly incomplete. Also let us assume we had some way of knowing that the star had not yet exploded. Do we begin the massive (and we'll assume expensive) task of putting some sort of elaborate emergency procedures in place? Assuming we did, who's to say that in 600 years our descendants would be able to take advantage of such countermeasures? Hell, they may have wiped themselves our 200 years earlier because they decided it was finally a good idea to start lobbing nukes at one another! Just another remind (to me) that we're pretty small, insignificant dots floating around at the complete mercy of forces we are just beginning to understand and appreciate.
I hope not because the Syreen live there and you know, what's not to love about scantily clad blue space women?
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The Internet Meme of which you are referring is the meme of the wailing site member whining that this site or that site is going downhill - going to he'll in a handbasket or that the quality of submissions has fallen. - It's user submissions! Submit Brother!
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
But I am interested in the ramifications in regards to astrology, specifically Egypt and the Pyramids. The end is near ...
It's called the antrhopic principle.
The anthropomorphic principle would be that the stars are smiling on us...
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
It could be a great Michael Bay movie!
BA BLA BLOOOOOM!
No, no, no, the first way to tell if a star has already gone supernova is by the change in graviton waves.
I know you are trying to be funny but if there are gravity waves (possibly transmitted by gravitons) they would still arrive at the speed of light much like the visible and other EM radiation with very little lead time, if any. These are predicted by General Relativity and as such cannot violate relativity's golden "no information faster than light" causality rule. Even if the current gravity wave detectors were sensitive enough to detect any gravity waves it would be an after the fact detection since it takes thme time to analyse the data and so they would undoubtedly use the visible artifact to search a region of data carefully.
Nope, gravitational waves travel at the speed of light.
Assuming they exist at all...which has not yet been proven.
...so to determine when Betelgeuse will "go boom", we need to figure out what element it is mostly fusioning at the moment.
This is hard to do. Although I'm a particle physicist, not an astronomer, I say some recent articles about a star "unexpectedly" exploding despite its hydrogen rich outer atmosphere. What you need to know is what elements are being burnt in the core which (apparently) are not necessarily the elements are present in the outer atmosphere of the star.
I'm just glad that users have the ID number after their name - otherwise Slashdot would be insulting me everytime I post.
Dammit - glad, not gald!
I thought it was a dyslexic Beetle Juice going to go boom.
It apparently can; if its low enough * & loud enough:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/09sep_blackholesounds.htm
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
Show us ur warcraft main's tits!
The distance to Betelgeuse is not known with precision but if this is assumed to be 640 light years- wikipedia
In 1369 AD there was still a star where betelgeuse is susposed to be, but it may go nova before Columbus heads of for Haiti in the next century (verb tense: future past imperfect).
Rigel is 700-900 light years away (years ago)
Epsilon Orionis 1300 ly
Gamma Orionis 250 ly
All are part of orions belt, and looking up at the sky I see them all at the same time, but its an illusion. Like one of those pictures where perspective makes it look like a person is taller than a building, or holding up the moon. Whatever happened to Betelgeuse in 1400 is shown in the same view of Orion next to an image of Gamma Orionis from 1759, and a picture of Epsilon Orionis from the 700's and without using photoshop.
---
I hope it will, I want to see a supernova explosion within my lifetime. I suspect it would be even more spectacular than the supernova from 1006.
If you post as an AC, don't expect me to spend a mod point on you.
How is novva formed? How star get expladed?
They need to do way instain journalists> who kill thier starrs. becuse these starrs cant frigth back it was on the news this mroing a journalist in fox who had kill her three braincells . they are taking the three braincells back to new york too jon stewart to rest my pary are with the Orion who lost his chrilden ; i am truley sorry for your lots
Towards the Singularity.
The real question is has it already.
Whatever we see happened 600 years ago, so it may have happened already.
Betelgeuse is 600 Light Years away
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
Polystyrene no longer sufficient.
Da Blog
We are all doomed, since in the new Star Trek movie we learn that supernovas are capable of destroying the entire Milky Way galaxy and must be stopped by time traveling aliens.
I should have said "If it happened around this time of the year".
No, I'm not counting my supernovae before they hatch.
It's showtime!
I'd have thought, with all the decades of observations, all the heavy-duty models we have of stellar evolution, that there would soon (or already) be figures for:
* The odds of this being a mild variability vs the odds on it being a stellar collapse as it switches fuels to one further up the periodic table;
* If it is undergoing a collapse, the odds on it being the "Last collapse" when it's already burned down to iron.
Cumulating in some distinguished-looking talking head saying "unfortunately, it's only 3% likely that we'll see it supernova in the next 50 years". Or whatever the number is.
I mean, the whole *galaxy* (~2x10^13 cu.ly) supposedly only gets one of these shows every century, and we're just inside a sphere of 10^7 cu.ly in volume around Betelgeuse, that's one two-millionth of the galaxy. The last Big One on record was the Crab Nebula (observed 1054 AD), ten times further away. We probably miss half of them that are on the other side of the galactic centre.
What I'm saying is, the odds against us getting this good a show are, well...I won't say the "A" word. So I don't want to get my hopes up.
Funny story, I read an article on supernovas once, which pointed out that if a star as close as mere dozens of ly were to blow, we'd all be fried. It actually ended with "The perfect candidate would be the red giant Betelgeuse, 600 ly away, far enough to be completely safe, while close enough to put on a mind-boggling show bright enough to read by."
I mean, seriously, the Pyramids of Giza won't line up to anything anymore, neither will those Aztec ones, and that's not the only problem, the stars are cool.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
It would be a shame if one of those stars on Orion's belt burned out, because Orion's pants would fall down!
-Fozzie Bear
The Nobel Prize was for discovering a binary pulsar that can be used to test GR. Indeed such systems have been shown to lose energy in a manner consistent with GR predictions of gravitational waves. However that does NOT mean that gravitational waves have been discovered. All it means is that whatever mechanism they have to lose energy is consistent with gravitational waves. Until we actually detect gravitational waves on Earth we cannot be certain that they exist.
Being that it's relatively close, would it affect the night sky by making it bright as day for some time? Also, any guesses as to what color would it be?