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Could Betelgeuse Go Boom?
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jun 11, 2009 10:22 PM
from the betelgeuse-betelgeuse-betelgeuse-winona dept.
from the betelgeuse-betelgeuse-betelgeuse-winona dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The answer is No. In space, nobody can hear you scream. However, it might go supernova in the near future, if it hasn't already. I wanna see that, even if it would permanently disfigure Orion. Ka freaking bam!"
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Firehose:Could Betelgeuse go Boom? by Anonymous Coward
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when it will happen (Score:5, Funny)
It's probably gonna blow the next time Lydia yells Betelgeuse 3 times.
Probable cause? (Score:5, Funny)
Global warming.
Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it THAT slow of a news day, or could no one else possibly outdo this clown of a submitter?
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Insightful)
"Show us your Warcraft main".
Your case is proven.
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Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think they're gone, and lurk mode depends on your definition of it. If I'm sitting around with a bunch of geeks talking about non-technical stuff, I don't think that makes it lurk mode so much as everyday conversation. When we have technical discussions on here, the level of discussion isn't the same as a professional journal but it's very impressive for a public forum filled with a diverse technical audience. It's still a common occurrence where I see posts on here that give me insight on an issue that I may never have otherwise come across; there are even fairly profound anecdotes.
I also tend to guess that people remember the olden days as being better than they were. I think the signal to noise in replies has gone up, but moderation takes care of that. The stories, well, frankly I've been here ten years now and I don't remember a time where people weren't groaning at a lot of the stories. I wasn't as regular of a reader back then, but I certainly remember vitriolic replies to every Katz story I saw.
A lot of times I see people whine about stories on here, it's seems to be myopic assholes who expect slashdot to cater to exactly their tastes to the detriment of everyone else -- and expect top shelf journalism despite it being free and them making little to no contribution of any type at all. I've seen complaints about technical stories, hard science stories, what I would call soft science interest stories, stories about new products, lots of the stories about nerd or geek culture. There's really very few types of stories that seem to be without complaint; if slashdot went the blameless route, it might have three stories a week and it'd miss a shitload of stuff that's quite interesting if you're a person who's actually curious about the world. If you want to complain about the quality of the actual writing, then I suggest you submit more stories with high quality writing -- this is a user-driven site after all.
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Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Informative)
tacky photos, weird fonts and poor layouts
Don't worry, they're currently hard at work on it.
http://www.cs.drexel.edu/~jlg95/stuff/shittycode.png [drexel.edu]
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Yes (Score:5, Informative)
The anonymous reader is wrong. A supernova would be accompanied by a large amount of shockwaves through the star, and a large amount of pressure waves. There would be no sound, in the sense that there would be no neurological interpretations of these phenomena, but they would still happen.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Informative)
Won't matter much.
First up, let me preface this by saying a supernova happening at six hundred light years is probably no big deal. Probably. However, there is some evidence that gamma ray bursts might be the product of a sufficiently massive star dying and producing a black hole, in which case we could be in trouble if we were struck be such an event at close range.
But having the bulk of the earth between yourself and such an event would not save you. Remember that we're talking about enough energy here to be detected over intergalactic distances using fairly rudimentary instruments. That much ionizing radiation will cause sufficient damage to the world's surface on the facing side to ensure the deaths of everyone globally.
However, this presumes that A) GRBs are in fact supernovae emanations, B) Betelgeuse will produce such an event if (when) it dies and C) the energy will be directed at us. There is some support for the idea that long GRBs occur as "jet" effects in two polar opposite directions, which would explain why we don't see them every time a star goes kaput. We need to be in the line of sight. If this were a common occurrence for the earth, it is very likely we would not be here at all.
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New doomsday scenario? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:New doomsday scenario? (Score:5, Informative)
Would the neutrinos affect us at all? Is this another doomsday scenario?
Please, please tell me this was a joke. Please tell me you actually understood what a neutrino is, and were intentionally posting something absurd.
In the off-chance you were serious, a neutrino doesn't interact with matter enough to do any damage. This is not a matter of any uncertainty. A single neutrino would have a chance of passing through several light years of solid lead without interacting with a single atom. Neutrinos are sleeting through your body right now from the centre of the sun; they pass through the suns outer layers unimpeded, and if the sun isn't overhead wherever you are right now, then they've also passed through the innards of the earth.
Neutrinos can't affect us. Or the earth, or much of anything, really.
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Re:New doomsday scenario? (Score:5, Informative)
The neutrinos from a core collapse supernova would be lethal to humans at the distance of Jupiter. Any given neutrino has very little chance of hitting interacting with normal density matter it passes through, but there are a LOT of neutrinos: about 0.05 solar masses of them.
Furthermore, they are the first things that escape from the core (apart from gravitational waves) since they move at near-lightspeed and have very little chance of interacting with the envelope of the star. The big flashy special effects are driven by the shockwave from the core reaching the surface, and that takes hours. So if you were at the distance of Jupiter, you would have time to die from neutrino effects before the blast hit you.
Admittedly, Betelgeuse is somewhat further away than Jupiter, and the only neutrino effects are likely to be a lot of very excited astrophysicists. But both Jupiter and Betelgeuse are much closer than 99.9999999999999999999% of the Universe, and much further away than everyone you've ever met, so the distance scales aren't that different.
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Re:New doomsday scenario? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the first I've ever heard of neutrinos being deadly to anything at all. I'm understandably sceptical.
The neutrino emissions from a supernova would be lethal to humans out to a light year or so. Really. Cross-section is ~10e-40 cm^2, average energy is 1 MeV-ish. You work it out.
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Re:New doomsday scenario? (Score:5, Funny)
More of note.
If it's 640 light years away, then it probably went boom 640 years ago.
Which only makes sense, since after all, 640 years should be enough for anyone.
GrpA
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Where's the kaboom? (Score:5, Funny)
What a show if it does... (Score:5, Interesting)
...rippling bands across the ground from atmospheric turbulence, razor-sharp shadows everywhere, with prominent diffraction rings around the ones from faraway objects. And a flaming rainbow streak, blue at the top, shading down through green to red, as it rises or sets in a clear sky.
If my calculations are right, it won't burn your eyes; it would be roughly equivalent to looking into a 4-microwatt laser, not nearly strong enough to be dangerous. A 10-inch telescope could collimate it into a 5-mW beam, bright enough to see passing through the air, if only it were dark outside. The Palomar reflector would collect closer to 2 watts, enough to start fires and such.
If it happened this month, most everybody north of the Antarctic Circle would be cruelly cheated. Any time from August through April, though, it should be visible in the night sky from just about anywhere but that same Antarctic. And yes, I'd be willing to drag myself out of bed pre-dawn for this.
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
I hope this doesn't interfere with the Green Orion Women Slave Trade from Star Trek...
Nearby Supergiant stars (Score:5, Informative)
...are candidates
You get a lot of talk about how spectacular Eta Carinae would be if it went up. There's already been a Supernova "imposter" event... ..and here's some analysis of whether it's a danger. ...or has done so already
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae [wikipedia.org]
http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/answers/snrisks.txt [rit.edu]
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/246576/files/th-6805-93.ps.gz [cdsweb.cern.ch]
New Sensationalist (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't exactly news. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
Betelgeuse is awesome and very, very pretty - I'd hate for it to turn into another colour or vanish altogether. Isn't there someone we could petition to stop this?
No Boom Today, Boom Tomorrow (Score:5, Interesting)
Are we really sure we're far enough away to be safe? I've heard before that a supernova even dozens of lightyears away would be a very bad thing for Earth.
Re:Aliens better shield us with something.. (Score:5, Funny)
The yield of such a gamma ray blast might x-ray and bake us pretty nicely, but it might be distant enough, hopefully.
But there aren't any aliens around. I wonder if they know something we don't? What we need is a ringworld with the rotation axis at 90 degrees to the direction of Betelgeuse.
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Re:Aliens better shield us with something.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Aliens better shield us with something.. (Score:5, Funny)
I just read a story today about a lady who missed the Air France flight that killed everyone on board and then today died in a car wreck.
Yeah I think Alanis Morissette is working on the song as we speak.
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Re:Correction - not a supernova (Score:5, Funny)
it was just Disaster Area tuning up for their gig tonight 600 years ago
Please consult Dr. Streetmentioner's reference for the proper use of the Relativistic Simul-Past-Present tense.
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