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Even if you don’t know its name, the red supergiant star Betelgeuse is one of the most familiar sights in the sky – a fiery red dot on the shoulder of the constellation Orion. Though hard enough to ignore, Betelgeuse has become even more eye-catching in recent years due to major changes in its appearance – sudden fluctuations in brightness that are still poorly understood. In recent weeks, the star has occasionally shone 50% brighter than usual, attracting renewed attention from amateur skywatchers and professional astronomers. These individuals are hopefully awaiting a historic celestial event. One day, you see, Betelgeuse will end its life explosively in a supernova – and from our planet just 650 light-years away, Earthlings we We will have a front row seat in this spectacular cosmic cataclysm. But will the current clearing push signal that Betelgeuse has peaked? And what would such a close supernova look like?
Despite the fervent wishes of astronomers, it is highly unlikely that anyone alive today will be able to see Betelgeuse’s great outburst. Based on the star’s luminosity, color, size and estimated age, scientists believe that Betelgeuse is still in the early stages of fusion of helium to carbon, which it must then fuse into oxygen, then followed by silicon and finally iron. At this point, Betelgeuse’s core will be unable to capture energy from further fusion reactions, causing the star to collapse under its own weight and crumble to pieces.
“We know Betelgeuse will explode soon, but ‘soon’ is within the next 10,000 to 100,000 years,” said Jared Goldberg, an astrophysicist at the Flatiron Institute in New York. “I wouldn’t bet my career on the explosion of Betelgeuse… right now.”
However, when the day comes, it will be amazing. The first foreshadowing of a supernova will be subtle but unmistakable: a ghostly stream of neutrinos emitted during a star’s collapse will suddenly overwhelm Earth, illuminating detectors around the world. . Soon after, as high-energy photons emerge from the dense cloud of expanding stellar debris, the real fireworks begin. “What we’re going to see is Betelgeuse gets really bright — like 10,000, 100,000 times brighter than usual — over the span of a week,” says Goldberg. Depending on the exact power of the explosion, the supernova remnant can become a quarter or a half as bright as the full moon, centered on a single bright spot – bright enough to be seen. during the day and cast sharp shadows at night.
And the show will last long enough for everyone to watch. “It’s really bright for a very long time — I mean, long for a news cycle, short for a human’s life, incredibly short for a star’s lifetime,” Goldberg said. For astronomers, the explosion and its aftermath will be a watershed event, offering a unique opportunity for close-up observations that are sure to reveal a wealth of startling discoveries.
Ideally, Betelgeuse was far enough away that we humans wouldn’t suffer any harm from the explosion itself. But humanity’s long history of supernova observations makes it clear that the event will still have consequences. Bryan Penprase, an astronomer at America’s Soka University, said: “The sky is going to change so much and everyone can see it, to the point where it’s really going to cause a huge reaction around the world. gender”.
Astronomers of the past tended to see supernovas as bad omens, Penprase said, and in today’s landscape of misinformation and denial of science, Betelgeuse’s disappearance could trigger some sort of backlash. worrying response. He said: “In our day, when people are already a bit unsettled, the appearance of a star like that is sure to cause a lot of fun, excitement and maybe even alarming speculation. from different parts of our population.
Although we have become quite disconnected from the sky, the supernova Betelgeuse will not be missed. “Being knocked out of this completely ignorant sky by something as dramatic as that would have a huge impact,” Penprase said. “Perhaps it could even spark an entire civilization’s interest in astronomy.”
However, modern Betelgeuse antics don’t necessarily end with a catchy new bang, Goldberg argues. Its odd oscillation between blur and flare “is still evidence of some really interesting physics out there,” he said. “The fact that stars oscillate on the human time scale is very interesting.”
Astronomers have long known that Betelgeuse lights up and dims in cycles – in fact, records from the Aborigines of Australia and the ancient Greeks show that this cycle was obvious to cultures varied across the planet from millennia ago. In modern times, this cycle lasts about 400 days, but now the star’s luminosity fluctuates much faster, around 130 days, says Andrea Dupree, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics , specializing in star tracking, said.
And Betelgeuse’s current dynamics appear to be linked to its so-called Great Dimmer in late 2019 and early 2020, which scientists attribute to the star ejecting a massive plume of gas and dust. . “Just imagine if you took out a large amount of material. Then everything else goes down the drain, and it gets chopped up,” Dupree said. The result is a quagmire of turbulent plasma and magnetic fields that could help explain why the star is now so much brighter than the predicted 400-day period.
Dupree likens the off-program brightening to an unbalanced washing machine that wobbles around. “I think what is happening is that the upper classes are struggling to get back to normal,” she said. “We hope he’ll eventually get back to his 400 days, but he’s struggling right now.”
