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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.
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
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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.
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!
When that happens we'll just have to say..Shit happens?
I just read a story today about a lady who missed the Air France flight that killed everyone on board and then today died in a car wreck.
I'm not ruling anything out anymore.
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The yield of such a gamma ray blast might x-ray and bake us pretty nicely, but it might be distant enough, hopefully.
But there aren't any aliens around. I wonder if they know something we don't? What we need is a ringworld with the rotation axis at 90 degrees to the direction of Betelgeuse.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
... new here. ;-)
I just read a story today about a lady who missed the Air France flight that killed everyone on board and then today died in a car wreck.
Yeah I think Alanis Morissette is working on the song as we speak.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
...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 interfere with the Green Orion Women Slave Trade from Star Trek...
That assumption relies on a lot of theory. One things for sure, if that star goes bang our theories will improve at a rapid rate.
Well, put another way, the theories have to be wrong in exactly the right way for the results to be hazardous. If they're wrong in some other fashion (such as our misjudging what exactly causes a GRB), then hey, no problem. If the theories surrounding gamma ray bursts and supernovae are right, we're probably safe. They have to be mostly right, but get the directionality of the burst wrong, before we're in trouble. Or the star would have to shift on its axis and point precisely where we don't want it.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Potatoes come in many different shapes.
...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
Well, we better hope it happens during the day when the stars aren't out.
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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?
Well, who knows? It certainly couldn't hurt your grammar.
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."
it was just Disaster Area tuning up for their gig tonight 600 years ago
Please consult Dr. Streetmentioner's reference for the proper use of the Relativistic Simul-Past-Present tense.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
That's not a supernova, you see, Betlegeuse was just in the way of an interstellar expressway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
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.
Oh noes, a lethal grammar ray burst!
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
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"
Or might have blown a few million years ago....
Did the speed of light slow down again? Really you'd think they'd put out a chain-letter or something.
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be. -PF
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!
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?
Our Sun is not massive enough to go Supernova.
So is that "Disaster Area wioll onhaven be tuning up" or "Disaster Area weres beening tuning up"?
Join the fight against time-machines. Crush the time-traveling grammar nazis.
It's called the antrhopic principle.
The anthropomorphic principle would be that the stars are smiling on us...
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
Yes it was.
From the linked page:
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The fact that light from the core takes a lot more time to reach the surface than from the surface to the earth has a completely different reason.
In fact, neutrinos aren't massless which means they are slower than light. The only reason the neutrinos arrived first is because of the way supernovas work. The neutrinos get emitted as soon as the core collapses but the first visible light only appears as soon as the shockwave from the collapse gets to the surface.
Disclaimer: I'm not yet an astrophysicist, but I did ace my cosmology exam yesterday
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