Zaphod Beeblebrox home sun 'shrinking', may have blown up The red giant star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion - famed as the home sun of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy characters Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect - is shrinking rapidly. Astronomers say that it has shrunk by 15 per cent since 1993, by which they mean that it actually did so in the mid 16th century. It may, in …
Apparently a supernova explosion at such a short distance is capable of wreaking such havoc on Earth that climate change would be the least of our problems. The main culprit would be the gamma-ray blast. Fortunately the blast won't be pointing towards us (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse)
"Some say that "Betelgeuse" refers in fact to Orion's "hand" or "arm". However an awful lot of people go with "armpit of the Central One"
And here's my Ode To A Small Lump Of Green Putty I Found In My Armpit One Midsummer Morning ....
siigned
Grunthos The Flatulent
I understand the explosion of a Type 1a, at such proximity, would probably cause a mass extinction (indeed, some speculate that at least one global extinction event in the past may have been caused by a supernova going off, near by). As it is, this is just going to be one hell of a bright light.
...could presumably be sorted out by Slartibartfast and his friends on Magrathea, couldn't it?
If not there were some very similar people in Robert Sheckley's "Dimension of Miracles". I forget their names, but they did make their own atoms, using micro-centifuges to spin up electrons before firing them towards atomic nuclei to be captured. When asked if they made the sub-atomic particles, the response was "Oh no, we buy those in from contractors, never could be bothered with all of that piddling small stuff!"
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And your comment raises what to my mind at least is the more interesting question. Betelgeuse is as bright as it is currently because it is a fairly hot supergiant. After the supernova, the reduction in both size and temperature are likely to radically reduce its luminosity. So will it remain Alpha Orionis because it was designated that at the time of it's discovery, or do we reorganize the names of all the stars in the constellation?
It's 20 times heavier than the sun. It's hardly going to "shake a galaxy" when it goes. It'll be a typical type 2 burnout. Shining at several times the brightness of the full moon for maybe a week or two.
Type 2s blow off their surface layers when they go, and it is those surface layers that absorb the radiation from the explosion and produce the visible light. You, me, the air you breathe and everything in your imediate vicinity - all of this matter was createdd during a process just such as this, when some unknown star, or stars, exploded long in the past. Type 2s are the creators of worlds, not their destroyers.
Technically, no supernova could ever directly cause a mass extinction, anyway. Even a Gamma ray burst from a 1a would only blow off the planet's ozone layer on the exposed hemisphere: it would be your own star that then slowly irradiated all the life on the affected half of the planet during the days that followed. If you happened to have the good fortune to be on the shadow side from the burst, you'd probably retain enough ozone above you to survive until the ozone across the afflicted side had replenished itself.
No, sorry: the Brazilians are right. It's the greedy blue-eyed white bastards that will probably be the death of us, not some distant star.
Good points, but to put my pedant hat on, only those elements heavier than iron and nickel are typically created during R-nucleosynthesis in a supernova. 'You, me, the air you breathe and everything in your imediate vicinity' are all things that are typically composed of light elements -e.g. hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulphur, etc., which are created once a star moves off the main sequence and becomes a red giant.
Just go and buy a new star, piece of cake.
They sell bags of them at Tesco, not too much £1.69 I think
Then get someone to stick it back up on the Blue/Black wrapper around Earth
All this talk of a universe, anyone would think there was something more important than my computer.
Sheesh
Its over 400 light years away.
Now if it was say 8 light years away, then all we'd see is a huge purple flash in the sky caused by the gamma radiation interacting with the air followed by a mass extinction event
Closer than 4 light years and the lucky ones would be on the side of the planet facing the supernova... because they'd die in about 5 seconds while the unlucky merely wait their turn to be roasted as the earth revolves..........
But 400 odd light years..... be a nice glow in the sky you could see in the day and brighter than the moon during the night.
Aliens... because they've already seen it....
Personally I suspect this was more related to the activities of one Zaphod Beeblebrox who in the process of trying to "relieve" the planet of some valuable asset or other maybe went a little over the top and did his version of the infamous Michael Kane line "You're only supposed to blow the ruddy doors off...!".
Or it was a giant bouncy castle...
Feel free to choose an orthogonal pronunciation :) I know one theorist who works on it and called Alpha Ori for years without even being able to point at it in the sky. As Feynman said, there's a difference between knowing something, and knowing the name of something.
Consensus among the stellar astrophysics experts I've talked to (I'm an AGN person myself) is that its not likely to go bang for a while yet (10^4-10^5 years), it's still a bit too red on the standard evolutionary tracks. Probably this is just an envelope pulsation (details of which we don't understand!) Even if something weird were going on it really ought to start oscillating pretty erratically before the explosion.
As has been said it'll be a relatively modest Type II, the light won't hurt us, and the shock/cosmic rays will probably be pretty dilute by the time they get here much much later. Yes too light to be a GRB by current models (incidentally Ia's don't give GRB's, similary too light/not enough spin, they deflagrate away) and as I think someone linked, its not pole-on anyway. I'd put my money on Eta Carinae instead.
YMMV, this is science, all predictions are subject to uncertainties. If it does go pop tomorrow we'll have a nice light show!
Increased UFO sightings, ever more cunning and numerous crop circle designs, a nearby exploding star (Betelgeuse) and we apparently don't taste like chicken but like pork. And we all know that bread doesn't travel well, even in the best tupperware containers, it's never been about the minerals or water, they only ever wanted our wheat.
This can only mean one thing, am I the only one that can see the truth?
In one last coordinated effort, every wheat field on earth is hit by a unified pattern so beguiling that all of humanity is drawn out into the fields to marvel at their splendour.
The giant, flour producing factory space ship, HO VI 5 moves into position behind the earth, lest any stray microwaves sneak through their shields deactivating their yeast stocks, it’s a real shit when that happens I can tell you. On it's final, hyperspeed, orbit before tucking in behind the earth it beams every ear of corn onto its conveyor belts. HO VI 5 grinds onto action, creating billions of small white bread buns, no sesame seeds tho' it's too risky as if there is one we know about aliens it's they are all allergic to nuts. Anything that looks like it might be nuts scares them.
At exactly that point the earth is blasted by interstellar Microwaves, cooking us slowly from the inside out. Every last, tasty, one of us cooked to perfection and easily harvestable, the cooked wheat stalks we lie in infusing us with their flavour and finishing off the cooking for that real, cooked outdoors, authentic flavour. We know how disappointing things taste at BBQ's that have been solely micro waved, to avoid poisoning the guests.
As this is a once in a universe event, they come from far and wide to taste our 'long pork' BBQ flavour.
A giant spinning, black, obelisk has been dropped in our solar system, at the centre of mars orbit, to which mars will be tethered. While the adults digest us and talk bollocks around the, still glowing remains of the earth, the children will be playing planetary swing ball long into the evening.
Although mankind and its home ceases to be on that fateful but ultimately filling day, we will enter forever into the histories of all space travelling civilisations as one tasty bunch o' bastards.
I've seen future and the future is so bright that you may as well forget the shades.
I always wondered,
What would happen to us if sol was to disappear suddenly say?
what would happen to our orbit? How long would it take for changes to take affect?
i.e. the for of gravity that keeps us in order was to disappear, how long before we would lose orbit and considering nothing travels faster than light, how come?
you're on the right track in that gravity "travels" at the speed of light, so for 8 1/2 minutes (roughly) we wouldn't notice anything diffrerent. Then all the bodies in the solar system would fly off in different directions. Of course all the planets are still gravitationally interacting: the trajectories wouldn't be straight lines as the planets swung around each other. I haven't done the maths, but I suspect none of the relavive velocities are low enough for them to end up gravitationally bound.
As a rough esitmate, life on earth's surface might last a week. Longer for deep sea and hydrothermal vent critters - the ocean stores a hell of a lot of heat, but it would ice over very quickly. After that the atmosphere would start to liquify and the earth would end up a frozen slushball with occasional vulcanism.
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