Slashdot Mirror
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!"
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.
...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.
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.
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."
"Does anyone else have any suggestions"
1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How true. Not that it was ever Shangri-La, but Slashdot did once have some interesting and informative discussions on, you know, technical matters.
And making it another pile of useless shit like Digg or Reddit is precisely the wrong way to do that. A younger audience can be intelligent too, dontchaknow. Competing for the large but well-served market (if you can call it that) of the sort of drooling morons who argue in YouTube comments is ultimately futile.
Shorter: we can has good geek site again?
I don't think they're gone, and lurk mode depends on your definition of it. If I'm sitting around with a bunch of geeks talking about non-technical stuff, I don't think that makes it lurk mode so much as everyday conversation. When we have technical discussions on here, the level of discussion isn't the same as a professional journal but it's very impressive for a public forum filled with a diverse technical audience. It's still a common occurrence where I see posts on here that give me insight on an issue that I may never have otherwise come across; there are even fairly profound anecdotes.
I also tend to guess that people remember the olden days as being better than they were. I think the signal to noise in replies has gone up, but moderation takes care of that. The stories, well, frankly I've been here ten years now and I don't remember a time where people weren't groaning at a lot of the stories. I wasn't as regular of a reader back then, but I certainly remember vitriolic replies to every Katz story I saw.
A lot of times I see people whine about stories on here, it's seems to be myopic assholes who expect slashdot to cater to exactly their tastes to the detriment of everyone else -- and expect top shelf journalism despite it being free and them making little to no contribution of any type at all. I've seen complaints about technical stories, hard science stories, what I would call soft science interest stories, stories about new products, lots of the stories about nerd or geek culture. There's really very few types of stories that seem to be without complaint; if slashdot went the blameless route, it might have three stories a week and it'd miss a shitload of stuff that's quite interesting if you're a person who's actually curious about the world. If you want to complain about the quality of the actual writing, then I suggest you submit more stories with high quality writing -- this is a user-driven site after all.