35 ms·
Since I had to look it up out of curiosity/paranoia, I figure someone else might also be interested/relieved to know: Betelgeuse has frequently been the subj
by mabbo 9y ago
Since I had to look it up out of curiosity/paranoia, I figure someone else might also be interested/relieved to know:
Betelgeuse has frequently been the subject of scare stories and rumors suggesting that it will explode
within a year, leading to exaggerated claims about the consequences of such an event. The timing
and prevalence of these rumors have been linked to broader misconceptions of astronomy, particularly
to doomsday predictions relating to the Mayan calendar. Betelgeuse is not likely to produce a gamma-ray
burst and is not close enough for its x-rays, ultraviolet radiation, or ejected material to cause
significant effects on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#Approaching_supernova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse#Approaching_superno...
- seren 9y agoHowever according to Wikipedia this is: >the star where the Elder Gods came from to battle the Great Old Ones [...]. Betelgeuse is also mentioned as the homeworld of the 'Ithria, a star-faring fungoid race.
- throwanem 9y agoSure - if you take Derleth's mankind-involving Manichaeism as canon. That's something I don't recommend doing, because it rather misses the point, which is that we are as ants under the careless tread of powers far older, far greater, and far stranger than anything we can possibly imagine.
- sqeaky 9y agoThat is all in the Pop culture and mentions lovecraft right there, this isn't some prank or defacement. This is just real references to literature.
- _jal 9y agoAnd if you say the star's name three times, you can judge the age of respondents on message boards by their response to the non-sequitir.
- anonymous_iam 9y agoAnd watch out for those sand worms!
- slivanes 9y agoWhen we notice it exploding it would have actually exploded 600 years prior.
- SAI_Peregrinus 9y agoThat depends on which frame of reference you pick, of course.
- didgeoridoo 9y agoWhat is the right way to think about this? If we observe a supernova 600LY away, do we say that event is happening "now" from our frame of reference? Or should we think of it as happening "600 years ago", and the light from the event is only now reaching us? If you think of causality itself moving at the speed of light (which of course it does), and think in light cones rather than referring to a nonexistent universal frame of reference with an authoritative clock, the "now" language seems more appropriate. Intuitively, it also feels quite wrong — but I attribute this more to a failure of intuition than of language.
- Santosh83 9y agoIt is happening in our NOW and that's all that matters from a cosmic perspective, since no signal can travel faster than light. In that sense there's only the NOW, even when you're observing your friend a few meters away. We might say that physics itself travels at light speed.
- didgeoridoo 9y agoI think even that undersells it. Existence itself moves at light speed.
- andrewla 9y agoNo, this is not a good way to think about relativity and its implications. When we talk about time in the sense of things happening "now" or "in the past" or "after", we have to think about reference frame, _not_ location. Reference frames are inherently global, as opposed to an "event", which encodes both location and time relative to all possible inertial reference frames. The typical metaphor is imagine that you infiltrate space with a three-dimensional grid of clocks that are kept a fixed distance from each other (say by a rigid rod). Those clocks are not moving relative to each other, and it is trivial to synchronize them, because the distance between them is fixed -- fire a light pulse to your neighbor with the current time, and you neighbor will know when you sent the symbol by subtracting off the time it takes light to travel the distance. This grid, that covers all of space, represents a single reference frame. So if Betelgeuse had in fact exploded six hundred years ago, then the clock grid in Earth's inertial frame would have recorded the event of the Battle of Orewin Bridge on Earth at the same time as the event of the beginning of the Betelgeusian supernova in the Betelgeuse system. The complexity of this comes in the fact that the inertial frame travelling towards Betelgeuse from Earth at some significant fraction of the speed of light would, with its clock grid, measured Orewin Bridge well before the supernova's start. That's independent of the amount of time it would take for those two clocks to communicate with each other -- we can almost imagine a scientist who finally downloads the logs for all the clocks in a given reference frame collating the data. What we _can_ say, though, is that once the event of someone on Earth seeing the supernova occurs, then that event is strictly _after_ the supernova -- no inertial reference frame will ever see that event, "observation of supernova", occur before the "initiation of supernova".