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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."
Just say its name three times and it'll all be under control.
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To you and the other 17 people who have already stated this and who will state this, we know. But we don't mention it, because it's irrelevant. Some of those who state it are just pointing out an interesting fact, which is fine, but to those who are stating it like it changes the story itself, or the importance of the story, or the facts of the story--shut up.
During a type II supernova most of the iron stays in the core and isn't cast off.
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.
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?"
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.
After the Big Bang occurred the matter was very very hot. So it looked basically like fire. But since entire universe was "on fire" and light has a finite propagation speed we can still see light just reaching us now from very far away places in the universe - Cosmic Microwave Background.
It has many interesting properties. First, as you point out you can measure our speed relative to it. Secondly, it has a very long wavelength which is due to expansion of the universe - the places farther away are moving away from us.
The expansion of the universe is actually very very small even on the scales of a solar system or galaxy and starts to matter on the intergalactic scales. It is characterized by Hubble constant= 70 (km/s)/Mpc - for each million parsecs the speed goes up by 70 km/s. For comparison, Earth's orbital speed is 30 km/s and the size of the entire Milky Way (our galaxy) is only 30 thousand parsecs.
Yes, there is a time dilation effect.
Btw, speaking of time dilation effect, the scientists at NIST has recently built an atomic clock based on a single Aluminum atom that is so accurate that they can see time dilation from Earth gravitational field. They measured the rate of their clock, than raised the setup and measured a faster rate - clocks slow down in stronger gravitational field and Earth field decreases by a small amount as you get further away from Earth.