We can't tell. But when it does it will be spectacular. It could get about as bright at the quarter moon — so bright you could read by it at night. It will stay really bright for months, and you should even be able to see it in the daytime for about a year. Supernovae in the past certainly left profound impressions on humans. Chinese astronomers documented a supernova from the year , and it resulted in the Crab Nebula, one of the more famous bodies in the night sky.
So, does Betelgeuse's death sound like the blockbuster of the year? Don't hold your breath. No one knows when the star will finally meet its maker. Guinan, too, hopes he's around to witness what's sure to be a thrilling spectacle. He says that he's been carrying out photometry of Betelgeuse for more than 40 years, and he's continually fascinated in part because it's so hard to predict what this strange and mysterious star will do next.
I nevertheless always keep an eye on it — just in case on a longshot it goes supernova. I would love to see this. That makes up the belt of Orion," says Howell.
If you're in the Northern Hemisphere, the upper left star which for Orion would be his right shoulder is Betelgeuse. You can tell because it is red and bright. Physicist Andy Howell says that he went to a conference celebrating the th anniversary of the supernova Galileo saw; it was held partly in Galileo's house, and partly in that lecture hall where he taught students. Sign up for our Newsletter!
Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. How to blow up a star. The images clearly showed that the bottom left-hand part of the star — as seen from Earth's Northern Hemisphere — had dimmed dramatically, and that the position of the darker region did not change substantially over the imaging period. This indicated that the dim spot was caused by a cloud of dust that had been spewed by the star itself, and was moving roughly in the direction of the line of sight, rather than passing by.
This enabled gas that the star had spewed out in the previous year to condense quickly into dust, blocking out light from the star.
This scenario was the one that fit the data best, as the researchers confirmed by running more than 10, computer simulations. Nature , — Article Google Scholar. Joyce, M. Download references. News 09 NOV Research Highlight 05 NOV News 04 NOV Albert Einstein College of Medicine Einstein.
Online, the story caught fire. She recalls seeing one tweet suggesting that the explosion was going to happen that night, with the hashtag HIDE. Under my desk? Ultimately these stars explode violently as supernovas. The images above are not to scale. But some got caught up in the excitement.
A detection of either one might be an early sign of a supernova. He found himself outside at 1 a. But we know Betelgeuse is an old star, close to the end of its life. It was exciting. Once the star started returning to its usual brightness in mid-February, talk of an imminent supernova faded. A paper published in the Oct. But what was it up to, if it was not on the verge of exploding?
As results from telescopes all over the world and in space flooded in, most astronomers have fallen into two camps. If the dust theory proves true, it could have profound implications for the origins of complex chemistry, planets and even life in the universe.
Red supergiants are surrounded by diffuse clouds of gas and dust that are full of elements that are forged only in stars — and those clouds form before the star explodes. Even before they die, supergiants seem to bequeath material to the next generation of stars. Perhaps an asymmetrical dust cloud was to blame.
That left dust as a reasonable explanation. A strong vote for dust came from Dupree, who was watching Betelgeuse with the Hubble Space Telescope. Like Guinan, she has a decades-long relationship with Betelgeuse. In , she and colleague Ronald Gilliland looked at Betelgeuse with Hubble to make the first real image of any star other than the sun. Most stars are too far and too faint to show up as anything but a point. Betelgeuse is one of the few stars whose surface can be seen as a two-dimensional disk — a real place.
By the end of , Dupree was observing Betelgeuse with Hubble several times a year. She had assembled an international team of researchers she calls the MOB, for Months of Betelgeuse, to observe the star frequently in a variety of wavelengths of light. In late , Betelgeuse started dimming V curve, right more than its normal up and down V curve, left.
The blue and green dots are brightness measurements from ground-based observatories. But from September through November, just before the dimming event, the star gave out more ultraviolet light — up to four or five times its usual UV brightness — over its southern hemisphere.
The temperature and electron density in that region went up, too. And material seemed to be moving outward, away from the star and toward Earth. That could be one way that red supergiants shed material before exploding. Once it had fled the star, that hot stuff cooled, condensed into dust and floated in front of Betelgeuse for several months.
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