Posted on 01/22/2011 8:58:26 PM PST by Red Badger
THE super-giant red star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion is destined to explode, but maybe not next year as some recent news reports have suggested and will not be as bright as some predicted FoxNews.com reported Betelgeuse has already become a red giant, which indicates it wil explode and become a supernova. But experts say it is not likely to happen soon and it will happen far enough away that it wil not hurt Earth US astronomer Phil Plait noted on his blog that a supernova would have to be no farther than 25 light years away to "fry us with light or anything else and Betelgeuse is 25 times that distance" The story at www.news.com.au predicted that a giant explosion will occur, tens of millions of times brighter than the sun, and suggested the event could happen before 2012. The story quoted a physics lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland, Brad Carter, who predicted that when Betelgeuse blows, night time will turn to day for several weeks on Earth“This is the final hurrah for the star,” Dr Carter told www.news.com.au.“It goes bang, it explodes, it lights up - we’ll have incredible brightness for a brief period of time for a couple of weeks and then over the coming months it begins to fade and then eventually it will be very hard to see at all.” That story is helping fuel internet rumors and doomsday theories by confounding the impending supernova with the Mayan calendar's conclusion in 2012 - which some believe is a prediction of the end of the world. But there's no reason to think Betelgeuse will blow in 2012, Mr Plait explained, or even this millennium"It's hard to know just when a star will explode when you're on the outside," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.au ...
Don’t forget... we’re looking back in time. The light we see came to us thousands or millions of years ago. We don’t see the universe as it existed now but at a particular point in time long before man arrived on the earth.
When satellites are used the calculations are MORE precise.......
Betegeuse is approx 640 light years away......
Atomic clocks are among the most accurate time and frequency standards known, to control the frequency of television broadcasts, and in global navigation satellite systems such as GPS.
I know what parallax is and what error bars, generally are. What I meant was, what are the error bars for the measurement of this star’s parallax (and therefore distance)? I have since read Wikipedia on it, and now know some candidate answers.
The US Naval Observatory(the U.S. official timekeeper)and NIST use atomic clocks
Ford Prefect will not be amused if it happens...
:-P
I was a Calibration Lab manager for 20 years......
I did a quick check on some of the astro sw I have. A couple have
numbers less than 430 ly, however, the online Betelgeuse ref in
Starry Night goes to Wikipedia (@ 643 ± 146 ly) and sources an
April, 2008 paper.
Cool. You must have some stories
Dang it! I had planned everything around this star exploding. Now I must rearrange my entire schedule.
I finally found it in a astronomy book I had.Parallax measurements (from the ground) are only really accurate up to about 100 parsecs (about 300 ly). Distances further than that have large error bars.Hipparcos (satellite that measured parallaxes) extended this limit
Since gravity sucks, as they say, and Betelgeuse appears to be running
out of "Red Giant fuel", all that mass that it has been keeping at
bay is going to start to fall back on the core...
...hence, the SN candidacy.
Monty Python, you say?
Nope.
Never heard of ‘im.
Obviously some kind of serpent tamer or something.
Sal “Killer Blancmange” Amander
“Even Salamander got the joke”
Yeah...even that stupid little amphibian got a clue.
Duh.
I don’t get it, Shibumi.
Duh-uh.
/village idiot
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