Red supergiant Betelgeuse heads for SMACKDOWN with 'dust bar' Earth's nearest supergiant red star Betelgeuse is on its way to a spectacular collision when it smacks into a "nearby" dust bar. The whole process will take thousands of years, however. Betelgeuse's enigmatic environment The European Space Agency's Herschel telescope has snapped a new image of Betelgeuse, which is in …
No / kind of - supernovae generally occur either:
a) when the star becomes sufficiently massive / hot to reignite and undergo either helium or carbon fusion through material accumulation; or
b) the outward pressure of the fusion in the core is no longer sufficient to balance the pressure due to the size of the star, causing gravitational collapse. The gravitational collapse increases the density of the core, leading to a) occurring.
Betelgeuse will nova through route b) - it is almost certainly undergoing helium-fusion at the moment, and when the helium concentration in its core becomes too dilute to effectively fuse (ie, the reaction is poisoned by too much carbon and other 'heavy' elements), it'll shed it's outer layers and undergo core collapse before becoming a type II supernova.
<url>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse</url>
Explosion - well... if I need to explain why...
Probably not connected.
OTOH a supernova happens when the star can no longer generate enough radiation pressure to balance the inwards pull due to gravity. Any additional mass might do that if the star is close enough to its tipping point.
For a REALLY spectacular tipping-point event, find out about hypernovae (pair-production catastrophes).
The cloud only shows up in the far infrared part of the spectrum, interstellar dust is cold, and the atmosphere does a reasonable job of blocking it. If the observers had been able to put a large telescope with a suitable spectral response outside the Earths atmosphere those thousands of years ago then it would have been spotted, otherwise it had to wait for one to be flown which pretty much means Herschel.
In two words - red shift.
We judge distances to objects that throw off light we can detect by how far their light has shifted towards longer wave lengths, i.e. red in the visible spectrum.
That's why aliens always look red. Or is that green... Sorry, bad colour vision.
Redshift only applies as a means of judging distance on large cosmological scales, that is extra-galactic at least, where the overall expansion of the universe applies. Not that you can't measure the shift, but it doesn't tell you how far away the object is (because the galaxy isn't expanding, at least not in the way the universe is)
Within the galaxy, you need to rely on other factors - parallax measurement as the earth goes round the sun is good, if you can measure accurately enough.
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Not if you’re “somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse”, from there orion still looks like some far-off cluster of galaxies.
If b’ chance you wakeup early with another Sun burning in the sky.. that’ll be Betelgeuse going supernova early.. probably best not to “top up the tan” though.
... is Betelgeuse close enough that a supernova there would be an extinction event here?
If it is, then now would be a good time to a) confirm the theory that iron at a suns core triggers supernova, b) identify whether or not there is iron in that dust cloud, and if there is c) work out how to travel interstellar distances in a hurry.
We might just have a supernova to outrun...
Nope, it's plenty far enough away. Supernova death range is about 25 light years, Betelgeuse is six-hundred-odd light years away. (Source: <a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/01/is-betelgeuse-about-to-blow/">Bad Astronomy</a>)
(Hmm, when did inserting links stop working for me?)
Fixed it for you.
(open tag)a href="http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/01/is-betelgeuse-about-to-blow/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"(close tag)Bad Astronomy(open tag)/a(close tag)
I did some calculations that suggest the possibiity of one of the jets impacting the Earth slightly off axis, and its not looking good.
500 R/hr for a week, total annihilation of the ozone layer and essentially resetting evolution back to the late Ordovician era.
Oh, and did I mention that in all likelihood the torsional forces could hurl the Moon out of orbit if it hits in the right place, causing yet more doom and destruction?
Lucky its not going to happen for at least 1.5 million ye)!)£ <NO CARRIER>
I'm still kind of hoping that Betelgeuse went supernova around six hundred and thirty odd years ago so I'll get to see the result in the night sky.
Although it'll be a lot worse than the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster, that's for sure.
(does not know what a Hrung is, nor why it should collapse on Betelgeuse seven)
From what I hear, if it did blow long enough ago that we see in in the next 10-20 years, it will be so bright that we will be able to see it during the day.
Courtesy of 'I Fucking Love Science' on Facebook.
"It's located about 640 light years away and it could go supernova at ANY MINUTE. Any minute in the next million years, that is. Hell, maybe it already has. When it does, it will light up our skies and be visible during the day"
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