The galactic core explosion’s sterilizing first wave of radiation can arrive at any moment, and by the time we realize what’s happening, it’s too late. Yes, we ARE doomed; it’s just a question of exactly when and how. #BetelgeuseBang covers it. Our options are to 1) continue as usual, 2) succumb to sacred or ideological frenzy, 3) party as if it all ends tomorrow, or 4) something else entirely. I’ll join a doomsday cult today, just in case.
Betelgeuse itself is too young to have planets, but a supernova of that magnitude would be lethal to life as we know it in a very wide area of space, spanning many light-years in all directions. I wonder what the chances are that it would destroy or severely impact life on planets close enough to be affected. Arthur C. Clarke once wrote a quasi-religious story postulating that the Star of Bethlehem, intended to guide the Three Wise Men to the baby Jesus, was a supernova that destroyed a benevolent and peaceful civilization on a nearby planet.
Realistically, due to the vastness of space, I suspect the answer is: none whatsoever.
Third in Google hits is Bellatrix, but much of that is the Harry Potter character Bellatrix Lestrange.
Betelgeuse is the most noticeable star in Orion. It’s not just a factor of brightness - it is *very *red, it stands out.
I wonder how many of the Rigel references are *Farscape *fanfic…huh, I see it’s spelled differently.
We always look at the past no matter what because light from these places took so long to reach us. We can’t see Beatlegeuse as it is right now, so there’s a good chance that it already exploded by now
You say you’ve seen Orion’s armpit
And your star is red
But you can’t see me
You can’t see me
It’s the Shoulder of Orion!
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like… tears in rain. Time to die.”
It’s also the home of Ford Prefect
According to Wikipedia - “ By 17 February 2020, Betelgeuse’s brightness had remained constant for about 10 days, and the star showed signs of rebrightening.[64]
But It’d be way cool to watch it supernova.
Well, yes, a supernova could be described as “rebrightening”
You might call “sometime in the next hundred thousand years” a good chance, but I wouldn’t. That’s less than 1 in a 1000 chance for Betelgeuse’s distance. Don’t hold your breath, even if you could hold it 700 years. 
If “sometime in the next hundred thousand years” is the correct estimate for the timescale. I’ve also heard estimates as low as “sometime in the next thousand years”, in which case the odds are pretty good. There are a lot of both known and unknown unknowns, which makes any probability estimate problematic.
Wait; 100000/700= 142.8.
1/143 is long odds, but a lot better than 1/1000.
Sure. The same sort of informative delay exists for pretty much anything that’s not right next to you. Sun winks out? You won’t know it until 8 minutes after it happens. When the Mars Science Laboratory was delivered to Mars in 2011, the landing procedure was (to me, at least) comically complicated. Here were the steps:
- freefall atmospheric entry from Martian orbit to 6 miles altitude, with atmospheric braking
- parachute descent from 6 miles to 1 mile
- rocket-engine descent from 1 mile until hovering at 25 feet
- rover lowered by rocket-hovering “skycrane” on cables from 25 feet to surface
- cables released, then the hovering skycrane flew off to deliberately crash a half-mile away
This entire process was automated, because it had to be. Folks at NASA were listening to updates being transmitted by MSL during the whole landing process, but these updates arrived at mission control about twenty minutes after being sent out, due to the distance between Mars and Earth at the time of the mission. So by the time NASA received final notification of a successful landing, the lander had already been on the ground for twenty minutes. If something had gone wrong, they wouldn’t have known until it was far too late to do anything about it.
Interesting article on past near-earth supernovae, their probabilities, and effects.
My understanding is that Betelgeuse does in fact exceed * Rigel in brightness/apparent magnitude to the human eye. But photoelectric measurement is considered of prime importance and so Rigel is listed as brighter.
- Correct me if this is wrong: ISTR something very recent to the effect that Betelgeuse, already quite variable in luminosity/absolute magnitude, is showing signs of serious declining in its peaks. This of course would carry over to brightness to us. If this is true and not a temporary phenomenon, Rigel would be brighter even if human perception were the criteria.
(With any variable star maximums are counted for luminosity and brightness.)
I came across this after posting:
Oops I slipped a decimal point in my guesstimate, thanks for the correction.
I’m not expecting to see the light from Betelgeuse blowing its stack in my lifetime, unless the Singularity happens, which I’m not holding my breath on either. But what I am hoping to see is improvements in observation methods and astrophysical theories so before I shuffle off, we’ll have a much more accurate estimate of when it’s going to go.
We should see other supernovae within our galaxy long before Betelgeuse blows up. On average we might expect a supernova within our galaxy every hundred years or so - the last nearby one happened in a satellite galaxy known as the LMC, but this made it somewhat easier to see, as it was above the gas and dust in the plane of the Milky Way. A supernova could happen right now on the other side of the Milky Way, and we might not see anything except a few extra neutrinos and cosmic rays.