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I always look at Betelgeuse when I am out walking an it's a clear sky. It's very easy to spot and you can pick out the colour difference with the naked eye. I
by tyfon 7y ago
I always look at Betelgeuse when I am out walking an it's a clear sky. It's very easy to spot and you can pick out the colour difference with the naked eye.
I hope it will go supernova in my lifetime, it will be spectacular. This dimming might be a sign of that.
- WizardAustralis 7y agoThere is a fella on the radio weekly here in Aus (and the BBC), Dr Karl Kruszelnicki. I always liked his take on it, "Could blow up any time between next Tuesday and 10,000 years from now. Don't worry about it."
- 0xFFFE 7y agoMay be it's gone supernova already.
- saagarjha 7y agoIt’s possible but reasonably unlikely.
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoIt's 'only' 642 light years away, if that's what you're referring to.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Aperocky 7y agoNot on my spacetime.
- perl4ever 7y agoSome say it's better to regard anything with a lightlike separation as being simultaneous and that things with a spacelike separation essentially don't exist for practical purposes. So when the light reaches us is when it happens, because not even gravity can affect us beforehand.
- 0xFFFE 7y agoConvenient perhaps, but the engineer in me doesn't want to accept that. Light is the fastest thing in the universe and it takes 642 years to reach us from this particular star. So we are lagging by 642 years. Those are the facts.
- zaroth 7y agoExcept that those photons haven’t aged a single day, right?
- lisper 7y agoCorrect
- 0xFFFE 7y agoGenuinely curious as to why you think they haven't aged a single day. Doesn't it depend on the point of reference? Earth is 500 light seconds from the Sun. So any photon hitting the eye is at least 500 seconds old. Hypothetically speaking, if a human were to be born on the Sun's surface and reach earth at the speed of light, he/she is at least 500 seconds old on Earth's clock?
- pacificmint 7y agoSure, but from the frame of reference of the human it’s not. If the human would travel at 99% of the speed of light, then time dilation would make it a lot less than 500 seconds. If an object moves at the speed of light, Mathematically no time is passing.
- mathieuh 7y agoIt's also why we can detect muons on Earth, a particle that would have decayed by the time it reaches us if its age depended on our frame of reference.
- 7y ago
- 0max 7y agoI was thinking it was a transit of some other celestial object in front of our vision.
- dr_zoidberg 7y agoToo much dimming to be a transit. Betelgeuse is so large that we can map its "surface"[0] and even planets in our own solar system are so small[1] that something so large to cause such a substantial dimming would have been detected a long time ago. [0] see this from 2017 https://www.space.com/37344-alma-captures-clearest-image-of-betelgeuse.html https://www.space.com/37344-alma-captures-clearest-image-of-... [1] Jupiter is about the largest a planet can be, in the current conditions of our solar system -- that means Jupiter was larger when it was younger, but it's been cooling off and reducing its volume
- bnjmn 7y agoMy thoughts as well!
- antonvs 7y ago> I hope it will go supernova in my lifetime The inhabitants of any planets in the vicinity might disagree.
- Kronopath 7y agoFYI, if you want a few hours notice before (the very unlikely event of) a Betelgeuse supernova, there’s a mailing list you can join: https://snews.bnl.gov/alert.html https://snews.bnl.gov/alert.html
- tabtab 7y agoRe: I hope it will go supernova in my lifetime, it will be spectacular. It could bleep up satellites and communication lines, nobody really knows. Be careful what you wish for. If Yellowstone and Betelgeuse go off at the same time, we are the New Dinosaurs.