Betelgeuse continues to fluctuate in unexpected ways
An optical image of Betelgeuse taken in 2017 by a ground-based
telescope, showing its not unusual aspherical shape.
Click for original image.
After the star’s light dimmed for almost a year in 2019 to 2020 due to what astronomers believe was a dust cloud that was released from the star, it has continued to fluctuate differently than in the past.
Now, it is glowing at 150% of its normal brightness, and is cycling between brighter and dimmer at 200-day intervals – twice as fast as usual – according to astrophysicist Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. It is currently the seventh brightest star in the night sky – up three places from its usual tenth brightest.
The astronomers believe the star is recovering from the ejection of material from that 2019-2020 dimming, its gas bag shape bouncing in and out like a blob of water floating in weightlessness. They also think it might take five to ten years for those reverberations to settle down.
Betelgeuse, a red giant star, is theorized to go supernovae sometime in the next 10,000 to 100,000 to a million years.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
An optical image of Betelgeuse taken in 2017 by a ground-based
telescope, showing its not unusual aspherical shape.
Click for original image.
After the star’s light dimmed for almost a year in 2019 to 2020 due to what astronomers believe was a dust cloud that was released from the star, it has continued to fluctuate differently than in the past.
Now, it is glowing at 150% of its normal brightness, and is cycling between brighter and dimmer at 200-day intervals – twice as fast as usual – according to astrophysicist Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics. It is currently the seventh brightest star in the night sky – up three places from its usual tenth brightest.
The astronomers believe the star is recovering from the ejection of material from that 2019-2020 dimming, its gas bag shape bouncing in and out like a blob of water floating in weightlessness. They also think it might take five to ten years for those reverberations to settle down.
Betelgeuse, a red giant star, is theorized to go supernovae sometime in the next 10,000 to 100,000 to a million years.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
go supernovae sometime in the next 10,000 to 100,000 to a million years.
So, don’t hold our breath. Is that actually a reasonable range for this sort of thing? It doesn’t seem much different from saying it will go supernovae “someday” or “eventually”.
10,000 years really is “real soon now” on stellar evolution time scales. A million years, for a star massive enough to go supernova, is more like “eventually”.
Call Me Ishmael: The range of time doesn’t tell when this will happen, it tells us how much guesswork is involved and how little astronomers know about supernovae. Since they don’t know the process that initiates this type of supernova, in a single star, how can they with any accuracy predict when the star will explode?
They can’t. All they are doing is making educated guesses, which are still guesses having little connection to reality.
A great many violent physical processes are triggered by what is really a minor stimulus that throws the system out of balance at just the right instant. Something like a mass ejection at the right time could be like a snowball starting an avalanche. “Predicting” such events would be a lucky guess.
Beetle juice, that’s what the EU, of which I am occupied over here, forces us to drink these days. A (German) food retailer in Sweden in their commercials even brags about they now selling processed food products containing “insect flour”. How tasty, yum yum. Makes the climate cooler too, they madly claim. As if this Spring hasn’t been extremely cold already. Methinks there’s a good evolutionary reason why human beings don’t eat bugs and why we find them disgusting. The foul.
So I make sure that I don’t buy any processed food products at all. No bread or pasta, no fast food or canned soup. Nothing that has gone through any extensive processing/mixing by the politically regulated food industry. Just raw vegetables and raw meat and fish. It is more expensive and takes more of an effort to prepare, but it is at least edible. They might be infested by a few bugs to a naturally acceptable degree, although farmers take extensive precautions to prevent that. Those milled bugs are now added afterwards to the good food.
I can cite my favorite Shakespeare to eloquently express my disgust:
“How horrible! How horrible! Hooow horrible!” Terrible!
Yawn.
I’m old enough that whatever it does won’t matter to me.
I’m still for Giant Meteor over Nearby Supernova 2024.
Mmmmm delicious bettle-juice, insect flour got what plant’s crave.
I didn’t know that (some) ground-based telescopes could resolve (some) stars into disks!
Andi: Betelgeuse actually is just about the only star where this is possible, because of its large angular size and relative nearness.
Three-Dimensional Supernova Explosion Simulations
Adam Burrows (2019)
https://youtu.be/ZDk5AzmNCCk
22:52
Localfluff–
If I’m not mistaken, our overlords recently approved “cricket flour” as a food additive.