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Betelgeuse To Blow Up Soon — Or Not
rubycodez writes "A wave of 2012-related hoopla has hit the internet about the star that makes the 'right shoulder' of Orion the hunter: Betelgeuse. Astronomer Phil Plait once again puts rumors to rest. The star will indeed explode as a type II supernova, and when it does it will be brighter than Venus when viewed from Earth, though not as bright as the full moon. It will be visible in the night sky for weeks, and could be visible in the day sky for a short time. But that event could happen today or 100,000 years from now, or as much as a million years from now. Since Betelgeuse is over 600 light-years away, its violent death will not harm Earth in any way, but will definitely provide a huge bonanza of scientific information about supernovae. As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime."
What they're saying is it might have blown up around 600 years ago... or not
it's under construction
Since Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away, it could have happened hundreds of years ago. We just don't know it yet.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Betelgeuse could have blown up in 1411 CE. News sure travels slow in our part of the galaxy......
Starring Bruce Willis, and a cast of ironic castoffs
From TFA: With all this drama happening 640 light-years away in the constellation of Orion
640 years ought to be enough for anybody.
"As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime."
As geeks, and with the star over 600 light-years away, we can only hope this has already happened close to 600 years ago.
Just say its name three times and it'll all be under control.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Who's mostly harmless now Ford Prefect?
Isn't beetle juice what they use for the pink food dye in battenberg cakes?
The Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster of Gal./Sid./Year 03758? Fiction willan on-take reality!
like.... light slow... :P
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
Beetlejuice beetlejuice beetlejuice! There, now it's closer so we will know exactly when it happens.
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
I dunno. Betelgeuse staying the way it is suits me pretty good. 1). Orion is the most recognizable constellation there is. It's supposed to be a man with outstretched arms, and well, it looks like one -- with his belt, and the 4 brightest stars. Yeah, they're his shoulders and knees, but so what 2). Betelgeuse is a bight star, and it's noticeably red. So it's a good example of star colors. Right next to Aldebaran, Antares, and Sirius, nearby and also red and blue (blue-white) 3). If it blows tomorrow, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy will soon be confusing. Well, more so. And that's a great geek book. Basically, the only people left out seriously will be kids. But seriously, Betelgeuse, is an important tool for teaching children. Not like there's much we can do about it.
The question is, can I make money selling Betelgeuse supernova insurance to the general public?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Can you elaborate on that? Are you just an Ix?
Can some physicist explain the relation of this story with Einstein's relativity theory? AFAICS, Einstein tells us that time difference, and even the order in which events take place is not a universal property, but are all tied to an observer. How can we speak about beetlejuice blowing up in 1411 in that light? Would there not be a possible viewpoint in the universe where the nova event would take place much closer to our time? Or even, "after" we see it?
Will we be able to find his home planet now that Betelgeuse will turn supernova?
Driving home one evening, someone said we should hold a party for the death of Betelgeuse, and invite Michael Keaton. My girlfriend responded "Why? Because he's a dying star too?"
Come 22 December 2012 there will come another Great Disappointment.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Yes. From the viewpoint of an observer passing earth in the direction away from Betelgeuse sufficiently close to light speed, it would be an arbitrary short time between Betelgeuse blowing up and us seeing it (from his view it would also be an arbitrary close distance between earth and Betelgeuse. Also note that in his frame of reference, earth would be flat. :-)
No, the time order of causally related events is the same in all frames of reference. The cause always comes before the effect.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
The whole observer thing is bs and because of limited imagination.
Just because someone saw it sooner does not make when it actually happened any different from someone a thousand light years away. Once both parties have seen it the further party would know it happened X years ago with X uncertainty because measuring distances is complicated. However on a universal timeline it happened when it happened and that's it.
Relativity of simultaneity is not about the time when you see it. It's about the time you get after correcting for the finite time the light needed to get to you.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I can see its destruction anytime I like. Just find one, stomp, pick up your stomping foot, and there you have your beetle juice, beetle guts, and beetle smoosh partly all over your shoe. Since they eat ants, and ants are a bigger pest than beetles, I usually leave them alone, but I digress.
earth would be flat
actually, there is not an observed contraction but rather a rotation in the direction of the observer. Problem is Lorentz-Fitzgerald (and many textbooks modeling observation of near-lightspeed objects) only consider one dimension in the direction of travel, but the three spacial dimensional treatment gives the rotation.
"1411" means "1411 in Earth's reference frame". Actually, unless otherwise specified (like in a physics problem), all times and dates reported by our civilization are measured in Earth's reference frame. Normally people figure this out on their own, but I guess you needed to be explicitly told.
I'm willing to wait this one out.
You are a horrible person wishing for the deaths of people 600 years ago!
Gotta love the "correction" at the end of TFA[1]:
NEWS.com.au would like to apologise for their error - as we all know, Betelgeuse is the second biggest star in the Orion constellation, not the universe.
Second brightest, perhaps, but you could probably fit Rigel inside of Betelgeuse well over three thousand times.
Now to fix the rest of the wildly overblown claims in the story...
how long does it take after it blows for us to see it?
Why doesn't anyone ask about Zaphod Beeblebrox? He's from there, too, he's president of the fucking galaxy, and
[spoiler]
the most important person in the universe of the total perspective vortex
[/spoiler]
It's mass calculations and core composition is as stated, it'd be a bitch if it threw a fit and sent out a sweeping gamma burst (think of a lighthouse but with a gamma beam a trillion times more intense than anything yet experienced) it might have lasted only for a year or so as the core of the resulting neutron star stabilized.
2012 anyone?
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
That depends on how far away Betelgeuse is, and we do not know that very well. The best estimate is about 640 light years, with an uncertainty of about 145 light years. This means that it would take the light from the explosion about 640 years to reach us. The first sign that we will get, however, will be a dramatic increase in the number of neutrinos seen at neutrino detectors. This is because supernova generate neutrinos during the initial collapse of the core of the star. The light, however, is not generated until the shockwave breaks out of the surface of the star, which can be minutes to hours after the core collapses.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Scientists should position a robotic space probe far from Earth (somewhere between Betelgeuse and us) so that when it detects the explosion it can radio back to Earth and enable us to set up cameras in advance, and prepare to watch it from the very beginning.
As an art specialist, you know about stuff like parallax. When you move from side to side, object appear to move. The further away an object is, the less it appears to move. By comparing pictures of a star taken six months apart (when the Earth has moved to the opposite side of the Sun), astronomers and astrometric scientists, measure how far a star has moved relative to the background stars, and can determine how distant the star is.
Another thing you are probably aware of is the inverse square law. A light source, like a candle, appears dimmer the farther away it is. Astronomers use a particular class of stars called Cepheid variables as candles. Cepheid variable stars grow brighter and dimmer with a regular rhythmic pulses. Their overall brightness is directly related to the frequency of their pulses. So when an astronomer sees a Cepheid variable, she can determine the pulse rate and compute the absolute brightness of the star. She can then use the inverse square law to figure out how far away it would have to be to match the observed brightness.
So, by using those two techniques (and a bunch of other ones), astronomers can build a pretty good model of stellar distances.
The question of how fast the Earth is moving through space is based on an assumption which has been proven false. There is no such thing as absolute motion. Every part of the sky is red-shifted. Every part of the sky is moving away from the Earth. Having said that, the speed of the Earth relative to the local group of galaxies is about 250km/s. Relativistic effects don't really start to be significant (1 percent variation from Newtonian motion) until around 30,000 km/s, so the dilation effects due to the Earth's motion are insignificant.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Well according to the most remarkable book ever to come out of the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor, a good chunck of betelgeuse was wiped out during the great collapsing hrung diasater of Gal./Sid./ Year 03758.
I assume it's way past the size limit for creating a black hole when it goes supernova. Would it be the closest black hole to us?
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
Unless the submitter plans on living in excess of 600 years, I think they want Betelgeuse to have undergone catastrophic failure a good couple of hundred years before our lifetime.
Even astronomist use observation date as opposed to event date : SN1987A is called that (as observed) and not the SN -168000A as when the explosion did happen. It is clear to everybody (well any with a modicum of astronomy or physic education) that the red giant, if it went SN, it was a long time ago (in our case about 680 year, since 680 ly distance approx). But it is much easier as human to mention WHEN it was observed on earth, rather than an absolute date on when it happened. To give you another example, if there were two SN at two points in the sky, one 10000 LY away , and 1 1000 LY away, despite those not being simultaneous, if tehy arrived at the same time, everybody would speak of them as simultaneous, NOT because they happened at the same time, but because the observation did. Sure in scientific litterature or in deep covnersation the date of when it happened might be improtant, but in the news for the lay people ? Nope it bring absolutely nothing.
to hear what the Church of Scientology has to say about this event...
Even if it does explode with the full brightness of our sun, it won't look anything like those scenes from Tatooine. Instead of having all that light spread over a disk as wide as our sun, it will all be concentrated from what appears to us as a single point. Instead of looking like another sun, it will look more like an extremely intense electric arc. It will be even more damaging to the eye to look at it, compared to looking at the sun, because more energy is concentrated into a single point instead of a small area.
But, if, as suggested, it has merely the energy level of the moon here, since it would still be concentrated into a single point, it will still be dangerous to look at, even if it only provides a minimal amount of working light to walk around outside at night with. And that all depends on whether Orion will be in the night sky when the big event happens, or not. You might want to check the star charts for December 2012 and January 2013, if you think that's the big day.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
My home plant orbits Betelgeuse, you insensitive clod!
I agree with you that something with the apparent brightness of the Sun but the apparent size of a star would be extremely dangerous, if it's the brightness of Venus or the Moon it's not a problem.
The image formed on the retina is not a single point: its size is governed by the diffraction limit of the human eye.
Since both Venus and the supernova have an angular size much smaller than the eye's diffraction limit of 0.5 arcminutes, the light from both will be smeared out to cover the same amount of retinal area. So if its brightness is the same as Venus, and the part of the eye illuminated is the same as Venus, it will do as much retinal damage as Venus, which is to say, none.
If the supernova is as bright as the Moon, you start having to do math.
Intensity of supernova image = Supernova brightness / (area of supernova image)
Intensity of Sun's image = Sun's brightness / (area of sun image)
Ratio of supernova to sun intensity = (SN brightness / Sun brightness ) * (Sun image diam / SN image diam)^2
If the supernova is as bright as the moon (magnitude -13), and the Sun's magnitude is -27, the brightness ratio is 2.512^(-14) = 2.5 x 10^-6.
The sun's diameter is 30 arcminutes; the supernova's apparent diameter to the naked eye is 0.5 arcminutes, so the diameter ratio is 60.
Ratio of supernova to sun intensity = 2.5 x 10^-6 * (60)^2 = 0.009
The intensity of the supernova would be 1% of the brightness of the sun. This is comparable to looking at the Sun through heavy clouds. Not real good for you, but permanent damage is unlikely.
(Note that it's *not* the same as looking at a sun during a 99% partial eclipse, because in that case while you see less of the sun, the parts you can see project the same intensity on your retina as usual.)
If Betelgeuse went supernova and subsequently turned into a black-hole ~600 years ago, would the gravitational effects have already influenced the Earth, at least in the modern era? Would that explain certain inaccuracies in astrophysics that would be corrected if this influence was taken into account? Hm.
Betelgeuse has a declination of 7 24.5' which barely varies at all, meaning it's visible from the North Pole all the way down to 75 South of the equator at least at one point during any 24 hour period. Most populated areas will get to see it at least 30 degrees above the horizon (the closer you are to 7 North, the higher up in the sky you'll see it, and the longer it will be visible each day).
So if it happens, you can watch it at home unless you live on Antarctica. If you have preferences as to seeing it at sunset, midnight, sunrise or midday, you might need to travel East or West.
I'd rather you rationally disagree than irrationally agree.
ok in stellar term 600 light years(lyr) is close. Hipparcos is a sattelite that can measure the distance via straightforward paralax. So when earth is on one side of the sun, we take a snapshot, on the other we take another. We compare the photos, and calculate the distance. The stars in the background aren't changing, nearby stars are. We can measure this out to 1600 lyr currently.
Astronomers have a decent clue as to how fast things are spinning and moving, unless we find that the "standard model" is complete garbage. The speed of light changing is a BAD THING, sure it would mess up astronomers, but it would also muck up stars.
Relativity doesn't have a cutoff it has a curve that is very shallow at everything except speeds close to that of light. So hot coffee is aging slower than absolute zero, but by a miniscule amount.
" ... we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime."
Since Betwlgeuse is 600 light years away, we won't see anything for 600 years, no matter when it blows.
>>As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse underwent catastrophic failure 600 years before a period in our lifetime.
Y2K. When the Y2K bug and other stuff didn't end the world, that left a lot of people pining for the next big end of the world. 2012 was the same sort of deal too, a calendar roll-date.
Yeah, maybe. Perhaps these people are too fatalistic.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
As a Betelgeusian, I hope you all die of some horrid venereal disease!
Have gnu, will travel.
And in other news, Osama Bin Laden is dead or alive.
600 years, since it's 600 light years away.
Well, first I formulated carefully: "would be flat", not "would be seen as flat". Second, your stated reason is wrong: It's not the three-dimensional treatment which gives the rotation (the dimensions perpendicular to the movement are not affected by relativistic effects), but the optical effects of the finite speed of light (if there were no relativistic contraction, you'd also see a rotated object when going close to the speed of light (relative to the rest frame of light, which you then would have to assume, and assuming the earth would be at rest in that frame); it's just that in this case the objects would also seem expanded in the direction of flight (i.e. the observed earth would look like a cigar, while after correction for the finite speed of light it would of course turn out to be round again; remember, no relativistic effects here). The funny thing is that the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction exactly counters this apparent expansion, so that if you consider both relativistic effects and optical effects of the finite speed of light, you again get round (but rotated) objects.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How fast is the Earth moving through space?
In relation to what? The Sun? Galactic center? Other galaxies? Your question is a valid one, but the way you frame it, it sounds like the thinking of 100 years ago, when the theory was based on things suspended in 'Aether'. Ultimately, the answers to all of those speeds is, it almost doesn't matter because unless you are really really far away from something, the speeds are inconsequential compared to the speed of light.
Does that combined speed cause a time dialation effect (even a tiny one) on Earth?
Any amount of mass dilates space/time to some degree. Momentum mass is equivalent to rest mass, so imparting momentum on an object will increase it's dilation of time. Again, unless we are talking about really insane speeds (say 10% the speed of light or more), the amount of time dilation that an object creats is also inconsequential. The cup of water question is an interesting one, btw. Water becomes denser when cold or frozen, but the energy you added to the water to heat it is also part of the system (e=mc^2), so if the cup is sealed so that no steam can escape, there is actually more mass in a hot cup of water, and thus more time dilation. Again though, a cup of water is so inconsequential in mass that it really doesn't matter. I think that the entire earth's mass dilates time by something like 1/1 billionth of a second on the earth's surface, and the earth is almost forgettable too, in relativistic terms.
If the universe is expanding in the sense that there is more space between all particles (this was how it was explained to me: that with each passing moment the distance between all particles increases as the fabric of space-time slowly expands) wouldn't the speed of light be slowly increasing (or decreasing) as well. Would a lightyear 600 years ago be the same as it is now?
The speed of light is a constant. If you travel at 99% the speed of light, and shine a flashlight beam in the direction you travel, the photons will still be traveling at the speed of light. Not 199% light speed (your speed+light speed) and not 1% light speed (Light speed - your speed). Space/time itself can bunch up into 'dense' and 'sparse' regions, but the rate of travel through the density of space/time remains a constant. So, the density of the universe might be changing, but the speed of light won't.
I am not sure what your 'global question here is. It seems like you have a basic understanding of things, but haven't gotten serious enough to look at the math of relativity and cosmology. (To be fair, it is really ugly...). Yes, we don't know exactly how far away Betelguese is, because measuring those kind of distances is tricky and hard to confirm. The way they do it is by boot strapping. They know the distance to the sun, using that, you can work out short distances via parallax shift. You can determine apparent brightness vs. actual brightness of special kinds of stars that are near by, and make assumptions about how far they are by how they appear to you. That gets you further out, and so forth. If you take a rubber band that is 1 meter long and stretch it, does that change the length of a meter? Of course not. If the space between particles grew as the universe grew, wouldn't that make everything in the universe grow at the same speed as the universe expanded? That would make it appear to people in the universe that nothing was growing, but that everything was becoming less dense. A better way to think of it is that space/time is expanding, and everything in it is just getting farther apart on a global scale.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Doesn't General Relativity postulate that an object with mass would acquire infinite mass and require infinite energy to travel at the speed of light? Therefor not a possibility. I'm not saying its possible, I'm just saying if it magically happened the object wouldn't experience time. I wonder if "stuff" with no mass experience time. Just something to wonder about, I don't think there is any evidence to suggest massless "stuff" degrades.
If you add momentum to an object, it adds energy to an object. energy has mass (E=mc^2 or in this case m=c^2/e) so, you have added mass to the object. The object is now more massive, and resists acceleration more than before. As you keep making it go faster, it takes more and more energy to make it go faster. This is why you cannot have something with mass reach the speed of light, because it takes an infinite amount of energy. You are in effect 'dragging' all the energy you previously imparted on the object.
Note that you can get infinitely close to the speed of light, with vast amounts of energy, though. But, as you acquire all this mass, it starts to dilate space/time. If you had a an infinite amount of energy to impart on an object, it would turn into a black hole at some point when the energy you put in added enough mass to cross the Schwartzchild radius for the object, and then your experiment would be pretty much finished. The object inside the fast moving black hole is turned into a quantum foam where space/time doesn't really make sense so I suppose that you could say that infinitely dilated space/time doesn't experience time...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
".. we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime."
I have mixed feelings about this. Although it would be quite spectacular and interesting to witness the demise of Betelgeuse, Orion, one of the most beautiful constellations, would be destroyed. That would be extremely sad.
Time dilation due to gravitational and relative motion effects has been measured in '71 by two guys
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hafele–Keating_experiment
The NIST guys can measure the effect without using a plane (or weather balloon), that means on rather short length scales, but spinning the story like this was the first time the gravitational effect was measured is... PR.
Just say its name 3 times in the mirror and it`ll come back again.
I bring Focks up merely as ongoing evidence that Rupert Murdoch bet T. Boone Pickins half-a-bill (i.e., $500M, chump change) that he could lower the average American IQ by 25 points in 25 years. And, yes, Murdoch's winning.
Pics or it didn't will happen yet already.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Sorry, can't elaborate, because I don't know what a Hrung was nor why it decided to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven.
Betelgeuse: Mostly harmless.
Ford...Run!!!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
He's seen "Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion." Poor bastard, never able to substantiate a story.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
So I'm a comp sci major, and astronomy and cosmology and the physics of the very large and very small fascinate me but I am incredibly ignorant on them. A lot of these (seemingly?) contradictory comments are leaving me confused.
My understanding of relativity starts and stops at high school physics - I understand the basics only. I have a basic understanding (think flashlight on a train examples) of how with c being a constant that three different observers may see the same two events as simultaneous or either one happening first, depending on their relative motion, etc, and that they are all correct from their own frame of reference - and comparing results from different frames of reference is more or less meaningless because they can't be applied to the same problems.
So let's say tonight we see Betelgeuse go supernova. Is it correct in saying that from our perspective that yesterday it was still there, and it's light and gravity had a meaningful impact on it's surroundings, and tomorrow those properties will be different, but from Betelgeuse's perspective this all happened ~600 years ago? That from our perspective it has x+y mass right this second (the supernova starts later tonight, remember), but from its perspective it only has x mass (where y is what it shed as it exploded) at this particular moment, and both are true statements - right now the amount of mass Betelgeuse actually has - not just can be said to have - is dependent on whether you are looking from Earth or Betelgeuse or someplace else?
Or am I way off base here?