Posted on 01/22/2011 10:06:34 AM PST by therightliveswithus
People love to hype 2012 as the end of the world. It's BS, but hey, when it gets into the public consciousness, things stick.
Anywho, a scientist named Brad Carter is predicting that the star Betelgeuse is expected to go super-nova very soon. If this happens, the sky that we look at could have two stars in it, even though Betelgeuse is 1,300 light years away. On the bright side, Carter assures us that we won't all die
(Excerpt) Read more at punditpress.blogspot.com ...
“Dang, you beat me to it....”
You got to get up pretty early in the morning to beat us Beetlejuice fans.
Most estimates I've seen have it around 600 LY away.
"When a star goes bang, the first we will observe of it is a rain of tiny particles called nuetrinos.
I have more confidence in someone who can spell "neutrinos" correctly. Would you trust a cardiologist who wanted to talk to you about haert surgery?
I don't know how Mr. Carter knows that the Earth is safe, but I'd like something a little more concrete.
Gamma ray bursts are the killers and they follow the poles of the supernova. Betelgeuse's pole isn't pointing at us.
In the year 1006 there was another supernova, SN 1006 that was visible on earth for two days. It was called a "guest star."
A lot longer than that. The original author was probably confused by the wikipedia entry "First appearing in the constellation of Lupus between April 30 and May 1 of that year," which simply tells the first night it showed up on, not its total duration of visibility. Later in the same article it states "There appear to have been two distinct phases in the early evolution of this supernova. There was first a three-month period at which it was at its brightest; after this period it diminished, then returned for a period of about eighteen months."
As for a "second sun", Betelgeuse's supernova would likely be about half as bright as the full moon. Impressive? Yes, very. But not a second sun.
Betelgeuse- Arabic-”The Armpit of the Giant”!
It’s Bush’s fault.
Womyn and minorities will be hardest hit.
There’s no way to pin down when a star will go kablooey, it could be in 5 minutes, it could be thousands of years from now.
Even when it does, I find it hard to take those “second sun” claims seriously.
Obamacare will take credit for that.
-PJ
Sensationalized reporting - it grabs readership.
When we were house-hunting in a new town a few years ago I spotted a newspaper headline that blared: "Local Murders Up 100% Last Year." Alarmed, I immediately dropped money into the machine only to learn there had been one murder, 100% more than the previous year when there were none. But the sensational headline sold at least one paper.
I would imagine by now, they’re all out of sunblock at the local drug store on Betelgeuse 3.
BTW, according to Wikipedia, the best current estimate of the distance to Betelgeuse is 643 ± 146 light years. 1300 light years is a very upper bound. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betelgeuse
It is also fairly young, only about 12 million years old. Massive stars like Betelgeuse, at least 10 million times the sun’s mass, burn very quickly and die in Type II super nova events.
I wouldn’t buy anything from someone named Carter. Even if he throws in a rabbit and a top hat.
1/0 = Inf. If there had been one murder in the previous year and two this year, that would be a 100% increase. I do not think my town has ever had a recorded murder. The town next door, similar in demographics, had its last murder over 25 years ago, when some guy was having an affair with a woman in his church’s choir. When she broke it off, her lover killed her husband.
I'm hoarding rice just in case.
I guess you’ll have to take that headline writer to Math Court.
It is the Red Giant in Orion. It takes 1300 years for the light to reach Earth. It has already exploded if he is right. Over a thousand years ago.
Of course it will have exploded in the past, that is obvious, but irrelevent.
I wonder why they didn’t shore up the “Old Man in the Mountain” with steel reinforcement or something. It’s sort of like Mt. Rushmore suddenly one day just collapsing. (We had a stone bridge in our hometown that just one day FELL into a pile of rubble in the river; destroyed one of the biggest tourist attractions in the town. They were doing road construction on the road beside it and didn’t to my knowledge shore up the bridge. It had escaped Sherman only to be leveled by neglect.)
Yeah, but if it happened 1299 years ago, how would we know?
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