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What Happens When Betelgeuse Explodes?
StartsWithABang writes: One of the great, catastrophic truths of the Universe is that everything has an expiration date. And this includes every single point of light in the entire sky. The most massive stars will die in a spectacular supernova explosion when their final stage of core fuel runs out. At only an estimated 600 light years distant, Betelgeuse is one (along with Antares) of the closest red supergiants to us, and it's estimated to have only perhaps 100,000 years until it reaches the end of its life. Here's the story on what we can expect to see (and feel) on Earth when Betelgeuse explodes.
where Ford Prefect and Zaphod Beeblebrox come from?
A long winded article where the crucial information "a little brighter" is hidden between 2 pages of fluff.
In Q2 we are all going to die, so we should shift as many receivables into Q1 as possible to make our metrics.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Yes.
But not by much. It's nearly 200 parsecs away now, and it's moving at about 30 parsecs per million years. So it'll be less than 2% farther away when it booms. Much less, since its relative motion is such that most of those three parsecs will be lateral motion instead of motion away from us.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Its galactic orbit is pretty similar to the Sun's, so its motion relative to the sun is not that large. Still, even if we assumed that only the sun moved, given the galactic speed of the sun, the change in distance would still only be 6 light years, or 1% of its current distance.
If Betelgeuse was going to supernova tomorrow, there'd still be nothing to be concerned about -- just something to be excited about.
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I, for one, will be pronouncing it "Throat Warbler Mangrove"
The associated EMP pulse
* will make all the WiFi Barbies hiccup
* Pebble Smartwatch with AC synchronous motor all start running backwards
* hasten return plague infested gerbils
* make Slashdot say "read rest of comment..." when is no rest of comment to read or is whitespace (oops already happened)
* make AT&T undercharge customers
* will change spelling of some words even in old dictionaries
* will change hidden embedded satanic message into incomprehensible phenomic gobblegook
* will turn chemtrail into contrail
* will contaminate Portland Reservoir with water they will drain and refill at taxpayer expense
* will do nothing out in the desert no surprise there
* will cause brain cloud
* will change Lady Gaga name to Ydal Agag and Huckleberry Finn to Fuckeberry Hinn no one will notice
* will solve discrete logarithm and knapsack problem by making people realize that despite their insolubility everyone is all ok the kids are alright so there really is no problem
* will make apocalypse crazed people reset back to factory defaults and they will walk around with default wallpaper for faces
* will reveal that we have two suns but only to drunk people
* will short out Hillary Russia reset button because it used cheap copper click disc design and was not properly shielded and we do not need woman president we need more female engineers
* will not be televised
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
But it's so much easier when /. links to an article with no substance
The article isn't entirely without substance. For instance, it helpfully points out, twice, that the sun is the brightest object in the sky.
I look at the sky every night, knowing the light is hundreds of years old. Half of the stars might have gone supernova already.
The life cycle of even the largest stars is still in the 10-100 million year range. The chance that one of them has exploded in the last few hundred years is tiny. Galaxy-wide we expect one supernova roughly every century so, unless you get really lucky, practically every star you can see with the naked eye has an extremely good chance of still being there...even Betelgeuse which they estimate has a 100k year lifespan remaining and is only 600 light years away. Of course if you had RTFA you would have known most of this...hope you appreciate the irony!