Freaky. Can I get a cite? I’d like to learn more.
OK, that one made me laugh out loud.
Too bad he’s going to be (at least) 440 million years old …
“And now, it’s the adventures of Superoldman! Faster than paint drying! Able to leap dust in several bounds! Cannot be woken from his nap … no matter what!”
More information about Betelgeuse.
It is unlikely that a star going hypernova would have a planet harboring life. Big stars live fast and die young. A star like Eta Carinae will live for on the order of just a million years before exploding.
Indeed, LBVs are the James Dean´s of the stellar catalogue.
Wait a minute… the Statue of Liberty? :eek:
Does this mean that Fred Phelps’ entire family/congregation will now be standing next to the star, singing about how god is destroying it because of the gays? Just checking. :dubious:
Antigen? Soylent Green is people. 
There’s this site, which will explain more than you’d ever possibly understand about the effects of a supernova.
This site offers its information at a level I can follow.
And there’s this site and this site, which have cool pictures of what it might look like from Earth.
Nah, the original book. With the planet around Betelgeuse.
It’s OK, the supernova is to herald another incarnation of the Son of God.
(Thanks, Arthur C.!)
Ten thousand years from now. On the other side of the galaxy.
(That’s one of my favourite stories…)
Same way we got here in the first place – pure, blind, dumb, random luck. Which is always subject to change at any instant.
First, supernovas and hypernovas, which produce gamma-ray bursts, are very different things. Hypernovas are supernovas occurring in stars with greater than 40 times the mass of the Sun. Betelgeuse is only about 20 times the mass of the sun, so no hypernova. Just a regular supernova.
Here’s a more recent version. The gist of it is that a supernova of the type that Betelgeuse would become would have to be within 10 parsecs, or 32.6 light years, to pose a significant danger to life on Earth. Betelgeuse is not anywhere near that close.
A more distant supernova might pose a threat to astronauts outside Earth’s atmosphere, but not to life on Earth’s surface.
Even if it does not pose a thread, would Betelgeuse going supernova cause a bright enough effect to be seen during daylight hours? What would it look like during our nighttime? A huge star? A sun-like glow? Would it alter our night sky?
It would look like a really, really bright star. It would probably be about as bright as the full moon. It wouldn’t get really dark for a few months while the Betelgeuse-supernova was visible. After that, it would be gone from our night sky. A few centuries later, there would be a nebula where it used to be, which would appear brighter than the Orion nebula (which you can see with the naked eye from a dark site, and is quite beautiful to look at in a telescope).