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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
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.
Just say its name three times and it'll all be under control.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Who's mostly harmless now Ford Prefect?
What makes this post so interesting is that you were the first person to say it.
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.
Just showing that /. Continues to post old news...
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
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?
What makes this post so interesting is that you were the first person to say it.
As geeks, we know its all relative.
Does this include the question whether to put an apostrophe in "it's"? :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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?"
>>"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.
As geeks we all understand that in our frame of reference Betelgeuse has not exploded yet, and it is our frame of reference that counts in this situation.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
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.
There is a mistake in thinking like this. You assume an absolute version of time. Relativity shows us that this is not the case. There is no universal time clock, and since nothing can be transmitted faster than light, not even information (barring crazy stuff like quantum entanglement) - it only matters when we observe it. Like the uncertainty principle, all common thinking tells is is that the atom must have a definite position and velocity - but it doesn't because we can't measure it. Same applies here, we can't measure things until the information reaches us, so that is when it happens.
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.
No, it's exactly our frame of reference where Betelgeuse is 640 light years away, and it is our frame or reference where it might already have happened up to 640 years ago.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
I understand very well; if we observe such a thing this year it will be "the Supernova of 2011", not "The supernova of circa 1360". For us on Earth, the explosion hasn't happened until the information reaches us.
i now realize +1 insightful = +1 geekiness!
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...
Calm down, he's obviously talking about his own inertial reference frame. And within his frame, he's correct.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
There is no "in time" That dimension doesn't work the way you think it does. Learn a little more about relativity and you'll understand what we're on about. Til then, please refrain from arguing with those who demonstrably know more than you.
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
how long does it take after it blows for us to see it?
Using that logic, I haven't slept with your wife yet just because you don't know about it. But trust me, it has happened already.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
"Like the uncertainty principle, all common thinking tells is is that the atom must have a definite position and velocity - but it doesn't because we can't measure it"
Wrong. You can't measure it because it doesn't. The UP isn't about your ability to measure something. Consider time/energy uncertainty. The faster an excited state decays, the broader the distribution in energies of emitted photons.
46 & 2
We can't measure things until the information reaches us, so that is when it happens.
I think you are misunderstanding relativity, or perhaps just miscommunicating it.
Example: Some cosmic microwave background radiation from the early universe is just reaching Earth today. That doesn't mean that the universe is young "now".
My understanding of relativity is that you can still use distance = speed * time to figure out when an event occurred in your reference frame. You just have to give up the notion that everyone else will agree with you.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
So if I close my eyes and never observe it, it will never have happened.
You can run a perfectly valid Newtonian clock-syncing algorithm when all parties are moving relative to each other at much less than the speed of light. That's the case here.
For any speed less than c, you preserve the order of events, and as soon as you say what the distance is, you're committed to talking about a fixed elapsed time because the speed of light is invariant.
The statements "Betelgeuse is 600 light years away" and "We're seeing it as it was 600 years ago" are equally valid. They're both approximately true for anyone who's moving slowly relative to us and Betelgeuse.
Someone in a relativistic starship who's racing the light from the supernova will report a shorter time, because she's just behind the light, and will truthfully report a shorter distance, equal to the (invariant) speed of light times the (her frame) measured time.
No. This is a very common misconception, but it is not correct. Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away. (The exact distance is somewhat uncertain.) It takes a signal about 640 years (or more) to get here from there. So, in our frame of reference no signal indicating that Betelgeuse has gone supernova (as of last night, when I took a look at Orion). In our frame of reference Betelgeuse has not exploded yet (as of last night).
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Quantum entanglement does not provide a way to transmit information faster than light.
I agree to an extent. In a Bayesian sense, if I were to assign a probability that I will see an image of Betelgeuse in the sky tonight, I should continue to assign a probability close to 1 because the probability that it has undergone supernova in the past day is negligible. However, once I observe evidence of Betelgeuse's destruction, it would be more accurate to assign a date for that destruction that best accounts for my knowledge of the time of flight for that information.
The time at which my probability function changes is fixed by the arrival of new information. However, I am free to assign a date for the destruction of Betelgeuse that precedes my knowledge of this event.
You can't say a lightning strike hasn't happened yet because you haven't heard the thunder.
But you can say it hasn't happened yet if you haven't seen the flash.
Really. It's not "it's happened, but I don't know about it." It hasn't happened.
Relativity is weird and counter-intuitive, but it's the best model we've got so far; certainly it seems to explain how time works a lot better than our intuitive, naive notions about simultaneity.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Unless it's bad news.
Stick Men
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
There is another common misconception in your post too, not even quantum entanglement can transmit useful information faster then the speed of light.
We can't measure things until the information reaches us, so that is when it happens.
I think you are misunderstanding relativity, or perhaps just miscommunicating it.
Example: Some cosmic microwave background radiation from the early universe is just reaching Earth today. That doesn't mean that the universe is young "now".
My understanding of relativity is that you can still use distance = speed * time to figure out when an event occurred in your reference frame. You just have to give up the notion that everyone else will agree with you.
You misunderstand the grand-parent. What he's saying is that it's senseless to say that Betelgeuse has blown up hundreds of years ago if all the effects from the event can only be felt now. Its light will only reach us now, any (extremely small, imperceptible) gravitational effects would only happen now...if somebody who was closer to the event, and thus noticed it "sooner" tried to warn you about it...you'd only get the message after you've already seen the event yourself.
For all intents and purposes, you may as well treat the event as having happened the moment you've witnessed it.
You cannot comment on what actually is. We can only construct models that accurately predict the outcomes of experiments (i.e. measurements). We cannot say that a microscopic system does not possess specific position and momentum. It's just that we have no basis for claiming these properties without the support of measurements.
You say that the uncertainty principle is not about one's ability to measure something. To what do you think this uncertainty refers?
Your final sentence also seems a bit backward to me. I would say that the more available states, the faster an excited state will decay, on average (i.e. Fermi's Golden Rule). This can be framed as a probability for observing the system in a state other than the initial state -- the more available states the larger the probability of making this observation on each trial. You can also make an ensemble of trials and assess the average decay time, which also fundamentally relies on what we can measure.
You don't get it - we don't need Science and Math to discuss these questions, we just need to refer to hundreds of years old questions philosophers never actually managed to settle. And its not the people who claim they can now settle those questions without even using science and math, questions many of the best and most famous minds of the ages got nowhere with, who lack humility - it's the people who want to defer to science and math. How dare anyone point out that Aristotle, St. Augustine, the Buddha, and Thomas Jefferson could only get so far in discussing a nearby supernova by relying on trees falling in woods paradoxes, we here on slashdot are smarter than all those guys put together, and you're being unmutual.
Who is John Cabal?
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.
So...things that are not experienced do not exist? I did not realize you had been resurrected Bishop Berkeley!
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
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?
It's senseless to say that Betelgeuse has blown up hundreds of years ago if all the effects from the event can only be felt now
No, it's not senseless at all. You can only reason correctly about the universe if you acknowledge that we find out about events *after* they happen, sometimes *LONG* after they happen. Just because you don't know about event X yet doesn't mean that it hasn't occurred.
Example: Your twin brother, an interstellar astronaut, is scheduled to arrive at Star X today, Jan. 22. Star X is 10 light-days from your current location. Suddenly you look up and notice that Star X has exploded! Has your brother been killed? Not necessarily, because you reason that Star X actually exploded 10 days ago, on Jan 12. Your brother, traveling at 0.1 light speed, was still one light-day away from Star X on Jan. 12, so he might have been able to survive. You won't find out if that's true for at least 8 more days, but at least you have to admit the possibility.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
You must be joking.
"I didn't see it so it hasn't happened" is the kind of solipsistic reasoning I'd expect from... well, a certain subclass of people who are not exactly well-disposed towards science types.
When in time it happened is a matter of observation. This isn't like a tree falling in the forest. You'll see that as I stretch the analogy to something that demonstrates the problem:
This is more like: "A tree is going to fall in the forest in 6 years, but it will take 7 years for you to travel there and see it with your own eyes. Has the tree already fallen?". And then it's complicated further because for somebody else standing beside you at the time, the exact same tree is only going to fall in 4 years, even though it also takes him 7 years to travel there. You meet up by the fallen tree and argue whether it had already fallen 2 years earlier: he says yes, you say no. And you're both correct within your own reference frames because they are not the same reference frames. Because time is not a constant. There is no such thing as "When in time it happened", and it can't be important because it doesn't exist. Time is relative.
On Earth it so happens to be relative in near enough the same way to every living human as to make no practical difference, but that's just not so when you start going all astronomy-like.
A simplification that might help you to understand it is that the speed of light is also the speed of time. There's a sense in which the "now" of Betelgeuse being obliterated has to travel 640 light years to coincide with a "now" on Earth. But of course this is a simplification only.
With all that said, so long as the relative speed between you and everybody you're talking to is very low (on a cosmic scale), then it's pretty much equivalent to true that it happened 640 years ago on Betelgeuse.
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.
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
"Example:"
Is it really so hard to understand simultaneity?
"Your twin brother, an interstellar astronaut, is scheduled to arrive at Star X today, Jan. 22. Star X is 10 light-days from your current location. Suddenly you look up and notice that Star X has exploded! Has your brother been killed? Not necessarily, because you reason that Star X actually exploded 10 days ago, on Jan 12. Your brother, traveling at 0.1 light speed, was still one light-day away from Star X on Jan. 12, so he might have been able to survive. You won't find out if that's true for at least 8 more days, but at least you have to admit the possibility."
But by the time the exploding start reaches me, news about my brother should already have reached me or else he's dead. The news you'd get would be more or less like this:
-This is captain Twinbrother transmitting from Uberspaceship in her "Let's go to that Far Star" mission. Mission time 61320H. All on-board systems working properly, still one year more to reach Far Star... Hey, wait a minute, our sensors are detectiFZZZZZZZZZZ
(you, to yourself): I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if the voice of a twin brother suddenly cried out in terror, and was suddenly silenced.
(then, your telephone rings)
- Is this doctor Twinbrother?
- Yes
- I'm calling from the JPL. We just recieved info from our telescope Hubble III; you won't believe it! Far Star just became a supernova!
"The UP isn't about your ability to measure something."
:)
At least you prefaced your statement with "wrong".
"In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. That is, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured." - WP.
Further reading - Embrace the horror
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
My home plant orbits Betelgeuse, you insensitive clod!
There is no universal time clock,
Actually, there is. In the sense of a standard reference frame that anyone in the universe can agree on. And Earth and Betelgeuse are moving slow enough compared to that frame that relativistic effects are insignificant compared to the accuracy of distance estimates.
Penzias and Wilson won a noble prize for discovering it. I'm surprised you did not hear.
Um, no he wasn....oh, wait.
Not "I didn't see it so it hasn't happened," but rather "I couldn't possibly have seen it yet so it hasn't happened." This isn't solipsism, it's an accurate description of the way reality works.
I'll say it again: relativity is weird and counter-intuitive, but it's the best model we have so far for the relationship between time and space. There is no absolute time, only time within a given reference frame -- and on Earth, Earth's reference frame is the one it makes the most sense to use.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
"things that are not experienced do not exist?"
Existance is relative.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You misunderstand the grand-parent. What he's saying is that it's senseless to say that Betelgeuse has blown up hundreds of years ago if all the effects from the event can only be felt now. (...) For all intents and purposes, you may as well treat the event as having happened the moment you've witnessed it.
Ok, let's say it happens right now. If I get into my lightspeed car and drive to Betelgeuse which takes me 600 years (earth time, no time will pass for me) will I be seeing the remains of a 600 year old explosion or a 1200 year old explosion? If you want to observe time like that then how long since it was since something happened depends on where you are. That is extremely unlogical, complicated and the only reason it works is because practically you're not able to go further than 0.05 lightseconds without leaving earth.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.)
'Life is both river and mountain, forest and sea. To know life is to be part of life. Give me your bank account number immediately.'
Thus far that seems to be their official response.
falling tree paradox doesn't describe the situation accurately because it's about lack of observer to notice the event not about the max speed the information spreads with.
It's not unlike the case of universe. It expands and is self contained and speaking about something beyond its boundaries makes absolutely no sense. From our point of view the universe is all there is and there is an absolute nothing beyond.
Science savvy people can understand that and in general accept such a state of affairs, yet somehow many have a trouble to grasp the idea of light cone that describes the expansion of events which can't exist beyond their cone - so they are similarly self-contained. There is no before/after to talk about when you are not inside the light cone of the event, it's that simple.
In the most abstract sense expanding universe is the cone of the big bang and the superset/sum of all possible light cones - but don't cite me on that, that's my ignorant guess.
Does lightning happen before you see it? There's a delay there too, just much smaller.
Until the light reaches us from a massively distant event, it has no effect on us (fundamentally cannot have any effect on us, 'cause for us it hasn't happened yet). If the sun just plain vanished somehow, we'd still keep orbiting around it for the short period (8 seconds or so IIRC) until the information reached us. Orbiting for that period around what is, by the ordinary conception of time, a non-existent body.
That being because, from the perspective of us here on Earth, the sun hasn't vanished until after the light-speed propagation time.
Yes I know it's kinda weird.
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.
"It would be called "the Supernova of 2011" because we name them after the observation year, not the event year."
The observation *is* the event. Something that happens in a time that can't possibly affect you is in your future, something that happens in a time that can possibly affect you is in your past, something that it is in the verge of affecting you is in your present. Let's imagine we see Betelgeuse becoming supernova by dec-31-2011. That's the earliest date that something regarding the supernova can affect us so that's exactly the date Betelgeuse becomes supernova. Everything else you can say about it is mere philosophy.
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.
There are 4 different Worlds
on Earth. Yours is 1 of them.
You're ignorant of 3 of them.
Such ignorance is damnable.
You are educated stupid and
can't compute a Time Cube.
You are unworthy of Earth
life and deserve banishment
to a barren planet - more fit
for your antiNature life style.
Are you aware that the MIT
Educators were as criminals
for banning student right to
debate Nature's Time Cube?
Ignoring Time Cube is evil.
Time Cube is highest order
of life, a "Cubic Creation".
MIT has become the first
academic institution on the
Earth to sponsor Harmonic
Time Cube lecture / debate.
I am wiser than any god or
scientist, for I have squared
the circle and cubed Earth's
sphere, thus I have created
4 simultaneous separate 24
hour days within a 4-corner
(as in a 4-corner classroom)
rotation of Earth. See for
yourself the absolute proof.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
" ... 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.
The entire lifespan of massive stars is sped up. In the few tens of millions of years encompassing the period from the birth of Betelgeuse to its death, not only would life have had no time to evolve, but planets might never have formed (at least, not suitable planets).
If she were going the speed of light it would only seem to her like it had taken a couple seconds to reach earth because of the time dilation.
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.
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.
No. This is a very common misconception, but it is not correct. Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away. (The exact distance is somewhat uncertain.) It takes a signal about 640 years (or more) to get here from there. So, in our frame of reference no signal indicating that Betelgeuse has gone supernova (as of last night, when I took a look at Orion). In our frame of reference Betelgeuse has not exploded yet (as of last night).
No, in our frame of reference it may already have exploded. It's just that the signal didn't arrive at us. The frame of reference tells us how to calculate place and time. It doesn't tell us what we see at some instance. For example, someone sitting here, and someone sitting on a planet near Betelgeuse would have exactly the same frame of reference if both are at rest to each other (note that I consistently neglect general-relativistic effects, which make the whole problem of frames of references much more complicated; actually I also neglect the movement of the earth around the sun, and a possible relative movement of the sun and Betelgeuse). However, the one close to Betelgeuse would see the explosion within minutes, while we would see it only in 640 years. However, for that imaginary person near Betelgeuse the time until the signal reaches us would still be exactly the same time, while there are other frames of reference (moving with near light speed relative to us) where that time is dramatically different (possibly much longer, possibly much shorter, depending on direction).
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!
At least he only said it once and isn't being an AC dick apparently replying to ALL of those comments with the same snide non-comment...
I really don't see how that's a defensible position. I suppose you're trying to argue something about non-intersecting light cones being effectively different universes? Once the light cone produced by Betelgeuse_explodes reaches us it's in our causal domain and we can reason back to the time before the light cones intersected just like for any other event. Everything initially happens in a different light cone from you, it's just that on non-astronomical scales the time is negligible.
For example, we can reason geometrically about when the light from Betelgeuse exploding will reach Andromeda, and the how long it would take our neighbours at Andromeda to send us a message saying "Holy shit! Did you see that?".
.evom ton seod gis eht
So after t+8 minutes when the earth goes flying away from where the sun isn't any more, will we say:
"Oh shit, the sun just vanished!"
or
"Oh shit, the sun vanished 8 minutes ago and we just felt the effects!"
.evom ton seod gis eht
"I suppose you're trying to argue something about non-intersecting light cones being effectively different universes?"
Yes, I'm talking about light cones but, no, I'm not implying them to be different universes but trying to offer an operative "relativistic" definition for our intuitive concepts "past", "present" and "future".
Let's think newtonianly. What's the past? The past are the collection of things that happen in a time so their effects could already affect us (a bomb exploding yesterday). The future are the collection of things that happen in a time so their effects can't possible affect us (a bomb exploding tomorrow). The collection of things that can affect us as I tell this is the present (a bomb exploding right now).
See that talking "newtonianly" I talk about *the* past, *the* present or *the* future since, at least implicitly time is an absolute measure.
But once relativity enters the game, there's no more absolute measure of time, that's why I talk then about *my* past, *my* present or *my* future just as I must talk about *my* space reference frame when talking about space instead of *the* space reference when talking newtonian (since space is too an absolute within Newton's).
This transition from *the* time to *my* time offers some counter intuitive consecuences like this one about Betelgeuse. It's a fact that no events related to Betelgeuse becoming a supernova could have possibly affect me, which means Betelgeuse will become a supernova, if ever, absolutly in *my* future. And in *your* future for that matter too.
Then, when you say, "but once I know about Betelgeuse became a supernova I can extrapolate to the past and tell that it *really* became a supernova 650 years ago" what in fact you are doing is an undeserved time reference change. What you are in fact saying is not that it "really" became a supernova 650 years ago but that it became a supernova 650 years ago in a *different* time frame (one centered in Betelgeuse itself). Yeah, well, so what? It makes as much sense as saying that the Moon is not 380.000 Km away but zero kilometers away (which happens to be true... for someone living in the Moon).
"For example, we can reason geometrically about when the light from Betelgeuse exploding will reach Andromeda, and the how long it would take our neighbours at Andromeda to send us a message saying "Holy shit! Did you see that?"."
Yes. And what conclusion we can effectively reach? That there's no way that a message from our neighbours at Andromeda about Betelgeuse becoming a supernova can reach us but *after* our vision of Betelgeuse becoming a supernova itself. So if we see Betelgeuse becomes a supernova by dec-31-2011, the message from Andromeda will reach us only sometime in 2012, which perfectly correlates with our intuitive knowledge about how time goes (first things happen, then you start talking about "hey, do you know what happened?").
So, for us, Betelgeuse *really* became a supernova by dec-31-2011 instead of some 650 years ago just as much as the Moon is *really* 380.000 Km away.
".. 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.
I gave the example of the time/energy non-commuting operators specifically because it isn't as misleading as the position/momentum. You can experimentally alter the decay time, which changes the line width. But if you don't like that, consider vacuum energy. Matter isn't created because of your measurement. It is the result of the fundamental nature of space, which has consequences for your measurement. The OP stated the uncertainty is a result of our inability to measure. But the inability to measure is a result of the uncertainty. A subtle but significant difference.
46 & 2
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.
The OP stated the uncertainty is a result of our inability to measure. But the inability to measure is a result of the uncertainty. The UP is a statement about the fundamental nature of quantum events, which has consequences for measurement. A subtle but significant difference.
To the second part - the UP has *nothing* to do with available states or ensembles.
46 & 2
That is our bias, an observer's bias. For example, "Supernova 1987a" occurred in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small dwarf galaxy orbiting the Milky Way, which is close to 170,000 light years away. So this star actually blew up just as the first modern Homo Sapiens began wandering around East Africa. Yet we call it "1987a". And for good reason. Many of the supernova we routinely observe in the early universe are reaching us from across such great distances, that they happened well before the Sun and Earth even formed; many perhaps even before the Milky Way galaxy was meaningfully assembled.
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.
it's a certainty we've named stars that don't exist anymore, and have made descriptions of their composition, spectrum, distance, trajectory, companions. And the light from their destruction will soon hit us.
ha. but we are presently measuring all manner of Betelgeuse's properties including its at least six shells, even though the thing, as a star, might not exist anymore other than as photons coming at us. So we might have a name and mountains of papers for something which is but an image.....
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
> So...things that are not experienced do not exist?
No. Events that cannot possibly have been observed cannot be said to have happened. On the other hand, events that have been observed can be said to have happened at times prior to their observation.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"So after t+8 minutes when the earth goes flying away from where the sun isn't any more, will we say:
"Oh shit, the sun just vanished!""
or
"Oh shit, the sun vanished 8 minutes ago and we just felt the effects!"
If such a thing could really happen (suddenly vanishing of a massive object without further consquencies) it would no matter what would you say. Let's take the Earth itself: it orbits around the Sun in an elliptic fashion. Well, it will perfectly orbit those whole 8 minutes; then it'll follow a tangent scaping trajectory. What's that? One of those cartoons where somebody is able to "float" just because he doesn't know about gravity, then somebody tells him and as soon as he knows he falls down?
You see it, you can monitor each and every physical property you can think off: it's there.
The uncertainty principle is expressed in terms of variances of measurements. It corresponds directly to our inability to measure conjugate quantities with arbitrary precision. What could you mean by saying that our inability to measure is a result of the uncertainty? What do you mean by uncertainty if not a lower bound to the variance for a statistical ensemble of measurements?
I'm sorry but I view empiricism as the foundation of modern science. Our theories aim to account for our measurements, not to describe some presumed ontological truth. The phrase "fundamental nature" belongs in philosophy, not science, in my view.
I should have made the connection but I didn't realize you were talking about an uncertainty principle. Why do you choose to talk about a conjugate pair that doesn't actually correspond to a pair of quantum operators? In any case, any uncertainty principle ultimately comes down to a lower bound in the variance of a statistical ensemble of measurements taken over conjugate variables. Your phrasing led me astray since I don't perceive any meaning to an uncertainty principle applied to a single measurement. Each measurement can have any allowed outcome. Only when I take a statistical ensemble of conjugate measurements and examine the variances does an uncertainty principle becomes evident.
Yes, but position and momentum have quantum operators. Time has no operator.
It seems to me that you attach some sort of independent reality to uncertainty whereas to me it corresponds directly to statistics gathered from ensembles of measurements.
Additionally, the simple increase of one variable as its conjugate variable decreases does not necessarily imply quantum behavior. This can be found in any conjugate variables (as related by a Fourier transform): If I increase bandwidth I can shrink pulse duration in a completely classical theory.
Sorry, can't elaborate, because I don't know what a Hrung was nor why it decided to collapse on Betelgeuse Seven.
If you think one cannot calculate an illusion, maybe you should ask the people at Pixar. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Betelgeuse: Mostly harmless.
So ignoring the silliness about time (not saying you're wrong, just that the concept is ridiculous - qv standard 'tree in a forest'), this part gets me:
How do you know the difference between something that you haven't observed and something that hasn't happened and thus couldn't possibly be observed?
You are right. I meant "fundamental nature" as a sort of metaphysical description. We are talking about some "feature" of nature that has some consequences - Hawking radiation and the Casimir force, tunneling and reaction kinetics, and limits on measurement.
I suppose empiricism is a lot of science. But a lot of good has come from interpretations that presume to know about things and how they behave. Even if they are just placeholders. I'm a scientist. Every day I talk to other scientists about things - not measurements. As far as I know, it's how everybody goes about it. I don't have any reason to think otherwise.
46 & 2
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.
If we don't know which, isn't he both? That's how quantum mechanics works, right?
"things that are not experienced do not exist?"
Existance is relative.
When I was a teenager working at the drive in theater, there was a first year philosophy major who believed that to the extreme. He turned his back and said "you don't exist".
I proved him wrong by hitting him in the head with a box of popcorn.
Free Martian Whores!
now we have to worry about 600 years of refuges from their planet, last I heard, 40 billion Gray Aliens. Lets hope they sent .3% i 300 directions/destination star systems for colonization.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Tell that to the person who witnesses a rifle bullet hitting a tree, shot from a mile away.
I can tell you for certain the trigger was not pulled at the instant the person witnessed the bullet hit the tree.
The same is true on a cosmic scale.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Actually, I was under the impression that changes in gravity could possibly be instantaneous, being an effect of matter on the fabric of the universe rather than a moving signal system.
We have no easy way of testing this of course, but lets say a star-sized object were to suddenly appear a light-year away (say, through a wormhole to be difficult). Would its gravity well not exist here for a full year? Would our orbit not be thrown off immediately due to the changes in gravitation?
Of course, we understand so little about how gravity works that its almost a useless question still, but I'd put my bets on instantaneous gravity shift.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Tell that to the person who witnesses a rifle bullet hitting a tree, shot from a mile away.
I can tell you for certain the trigger was not pulled at the instant the person witnessed the bullet hit the tree.
The same is true on a cosmic scale.
No, it's really not the same on a cosmic scale. The difference being the speed of the bullet is not the speed-limit of all information communication in the universe. The shooter can get updated information on the target faster than the bullet can reach you. There is absolutely no way you can get updated information on a star before its light reaches you. There's absolutely nothing about the star that can possibly affect you in any way whatsoever before its light reaches you.
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?
"Yes, but position and momentum have quantum operators. Time has no operator. "
I don't "do" quantum mechanics regularly enough to be very familiar with the literature. But, this isn't what I was told in my graduate work. I haven't ever used it as such, but there is a formulation for a time operator conjugate to energy. A brief search turned up a current review.
"Time as a Quantum Observable, Canonically Conjugated to Energy, and Foundations of Self-Consistent Time Analysis of Quantum Processes"
Advances in Mathematical Physics
Volume 2009 (2009), Article ID 859710, 83 pages
doi:10.1155/2009/859710
If you hit a pay wall I'd be happy to forward a pdf. Anyway, I don't think any of that is germane to my point. Which I'm sure you get, pedantry aside.
46 & 2
its effect on me is irrelevant. One of the things that annoys me most about amateur reporting on cosmological data is the lack of understanding of time.
One of the most interesting things you can explain to someone who doesn't understand cosmological scale is that the further away a light source is, the further back in time you're looking. Ignoring this fact and playing make-believe with your data because its convenient eventually causes errors in assumptions on a larger scale.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
its effect on me is irrelevant.
When you're talking about what it is that you're going to see in the sky, it is the only thing that is relevant.
One of the most interesting things you can explain to someone who doesn't understand cosmological scale is that the further away a light source is, the further back in time you're looking. Ignoring this fact and playing make-believe with your data because its convenient eventually causes errors in assumptions on a larger scale.
Nobody's "playing make-believe" with the data. It's simply about choosing what's important for the case at hand. Being pedantic about saying, "the star isn't going to go nova soon, it has in fact already gone nova long ago" is about as stupid as calculating the kinetic energy of a car traveling at 60 mph using the equations of relativity. Newton's equations are "incorrect", but goddamnit, for the case you're studying the difference doesn't matter.
In this case, if we do it your way and you tell me that Betelgeuse has probably gone nova about 600 years ago, that's not enough information. I'm going to have to ask you, "how far away is Betelgeuse?" in order to figure out if we have historic records of it going nova that I can look up, or if it's going to happen soon in the future, or if it's not going to happen anytime in my lifetime. If we do it my away and say, "SN 393" went nova in 393 AD you've given me the information I actually care about, and can look up the record of Chinese astronomers recording the star that suddenly appeared. In fact, that's why actual astronomers, as in the people who actually study these things for a living, treat it this way, and it's why the supernova SN 393 is fucking called SN 393. SN for supernova, 393 for when the event was observable on Earth.