Betelgeuse Supernova

Here is the link to this incredible upcoming event?
I apologise if this has recently been already reported on, it just seems so exciting and relatively unmemtioned if at all on ATS?
www.huffingtonpost.com...

Originally posted by Dr Expired
Here is the link to this incredible upcoming event?
I apologise if this has recently been already reported on, it just seems so exciting and relatively unmemtioned if at all on ATS?
www.huffingtonpost.com...

Possible, yes, in our lifetime? In our children's, or grandchildren's? Nobody knows for sure, it is impossible to predict an accurate time frame for the death of a star by our current knowledge.

We know the star is aging and near death, however, for all we know, that could be in a million years, literally.

I wish it would happen soon, I dabble a bit in astronomy and whenever I'm out with my telescope when Orion's out, I always look at Betelgeuse thinking how great it would be to see it actually go supernova! That'd be one to tell the grandchildren! It's unlikely though as the article went on to say that it could be as long a wait as 100,000 years.

Originally posted by Insomniac
I wish it would happen soon, I dabble a bit in astronomy and whenever I'm out with my telescope when Orion's out, I always look at Betelgeuse thinking how great it would be to see it actually go supernova! That'd be one to tell the grandchildren! It's unlikely though as the article went on to say that it could be as long a wait as 100,000 years.

Be careful what you wish for, there are those that say the Betelgeuse super nova could spell alot of trouble for us here on earth.

reply to post by Helious


Mmm yes so its not set in stone the sept 21st date?

Had it in my 8 inch dobsonian Newtonian Reflector scope last night in Australia it was Bright Bright.

Who knows though like you say.

Originally posted by Dr Expired
Here is the link to this incredible upcoming event?
I apologise if this has recently been already reported on, it just seems so exciting and relatively unmemtioned if at all on ATS?
www.huffingtonpost.com...

No need to apologise Doc, I was quite excited when I first heard about it too.

I started a thread earlier this year, there is some pretty good discussions in there.

ATS

Originally posted by Dr Expired
Here is the link to this incredible upcoming event?
I apologise if this has recently been already reported on, it just seems so exciting and relatively unmemtioned if at all on ATS?
www.huffingtonpost.com...

That article was the first I ever heard of it being 1300 light years away and large enough to create a black hole.

Then again, two clarifications followed the article, so maybe room for one more. I was taught about 200-400 light years distant. It is at its end, but that end could be along time coming. I really don't want to see it go-- it will mess up my favorite constellation.

reply to post by Dr Expired




It was predicted a year ago (around December 2010) that it will blows anytime, but to be honest, scientist are still arguing about its distance to earth (anything between 180 light years up to 1300)!

en.wikipedia.org...

However, what happened to the poor Betelgeuse it happened in the past (range between 180 – 1300) years ago. How in hell they come up with the theory of supernova/neutron star or even worse a black hole!?

Originally posted by Helious
Be careful what you wish for, there are those that say the Betelgeuse super nova could spell alot of trouble for us here on earth.

I was looking for an article I saw a while back that said there are no stars near enough to cause us serious damage, but I couldn't find it - maybe it was in a book. Anyway, I found this and it pretty much says the same thing. It gives the distance as 500 light years for Betelgeuse purely for simplicity. The actual distance is believed to be around 640 light years. I just hope that the guys you refer to are wrong!

badastronomy.com

reply to post by amkia


What do you mean it could blow at any time? I thought that if it was to blow tommorow, we would have to wait 100-1300 years for the light to reach us or something like that.... If that is correct, it is possible Betegeuse has already exploded. Isn't it?

reply to post by Frira


It's thought to be about 650 light years away.
Seems like at that distance Earth could be at risk especially if it went black hole (i'm not expert though).
If it turned into a black hole how far would the event horizon extend?

Why is this guy speculating? He knows just as well as they did last year that we wont know til around, well, 650 years AFTER it goes supernova.

Oh.. Also it would be awesome to have that second temporary sun. Imagine if it was much smaller and cast an unusual light (i know it probably isn't and indicator, but betegeuse flashes blue and red) and we ended up with a blue or red day time in place of our nights?

Originally posted by GogoVicMorrow
Seems like at that distance Earth could be at risk especially if it went black hole (i'm not expert though).
If it turned into a black hole how far would the event horizon extend?

The radius of an event horizon is R=2GM/c^2.

G=6.67384*10^-11 m^3 kg^-1 s^-2
M (Betelgeuese)=18.5 solar masses=3.68*10^31 kg
c=299792458 m/s

Plug it all in, and R=54653 m, or about 34 miles.

reply to post by FurvusRexCaeli


Ah..
Pshh public school has greatly exaggerated black holes. It seems all I've been doing since I got out is relearning everything correctly.

If my star was thinking about going supernova on me I might be looking for a nice stable yellow dwarf to hook up with.

Originally posted by GogoVicMorrow
reply to post by FurvusRexCaeli

 

Ah..
Pshh public school has greatly exaggerated black holes. It seems all I've been doing since I got out is relearning everything correctly.

Yes they did, very much so. Reminds me of my parents and grand-parents retelling the stories from ww2 when you would hide under a desk in the event of an attack.. really? a desk? hahaha.

All jokes aside though, beatleguse is a fair sized star, but not like some other giants out there in the cosmos. It would only produce a stellar mass black hole.

Does anyone know if there is a third catagory for black holes? Stellar mass (The babys), an unknown middle size, and then super massive black holes.

There are both super, and hyper nova's now.. and im sure they would produce black holes much bigger then ones that stars just a bit bigger then our sun would produce...

Are there any good theories on how super massive black holes form? Do they come from hyper nova? Or are they from black holes joining? Any help with these questions would greatly appreciated Good thread OP

reply to post by tbonedude


Hmm.. don't know about the intermediate-blackhole, but they touch on it at the end of this paragraph on the the formation of supermassives from wikipedia:

There are many models for the formation of black holes of this size. The most obvious is by slow accretion of matter starting from a black hole of stellar size. Another model[6] of supermassive black hole formation involves a large gas cloud collapsing into a relativistic star of perhaps a hundred thousand solar masses or larger. The star would then become unstable to radial perturbations because of electron-positron pair production in its core, and may collapse directly into a black hole without a supernova explosion, which would eject most of its mass and prevent it from leaving a supermassive black hole as a remnant. Yet another model[7] involves a dense stellar cluster undergoing core-collapse as the negative heat capacity of the system drives the velocity dispersion in the core to relativistic speeds. Finally, primordial black holes may have been produced directly from external pressure in the first instants after the Big Bang.

The difficulty in forming a supermassive black hole resides in the need for enough matter to be in a small enough volume. This matter needs to have very little angular momentum in order for this to happen. Normally the process of accretion involves transporting a large initial endowment of angular momentum outwards, and this appears to be the limiting factor in black hole growth, and explains the formation of accretion disks.

Currently, there appears to be a gap in the observed mass distribution of black holes. There are stellar-mass black holes, generated from collapsing stars, which range up to perhaps 33 solar masses. The minimal supermassive black hole is in the range of a hundred thousand solar masses. Between these regimes there appears to be a dearth of intermediate-mass black holes. Such a gap would suggest qualitatively different formation processes. However, some models[8] suggest that ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) may be black holes from this missing group.

reply to post by GogoVicMorrow


Interesting read, thanks much for that. I've recently been playing a silly game on my laptop called Solar2. While the game is great and all, it only really covers 1 type of black holes... the stellar mass ones. You start as a baby black hole, and essentially eat your way all the way up to what is known in the game as the big crunch. You become so massive you (and this is where I start to assume if its even possible) eat all matter, and space-time as well it seems. I've not found any information on that either.. regardless its interesting anyway.

Originally posted by Insomniac
I wish it would happen soon, I dabble a bit in astronomy and whenever I'm out with my telescope when Orion's out, I always look at Betelgeuse thinking how great it would be to see it actually go supernova! That'd be one to tell the grandchildren! It's unlikely though as the article went on to say that it could be as long a wait as 100,000 years.

If it goes supernova, you won't need a telescope to see it at night. It'll be visible during the day, and look like a second sun.

reply to post by Aeons


Wow really? Even at 500-650~ LY away? How come we don't see more observations like this in our normal sky? How long would/could it last? Maybe its just my location.. Unless I travel 3 hours up to the Poconos of PA,USA There is a lot of air/light pollution so maybe I just answered my own question. When In the Poconos I see easily 10fold more stars then I do at home, just outside of Philadelphia. On any given night.. I can see orions belt, the dipper(s) and the pole star.. and maybe say 50 other stars.. I can almost count the stars I see to give an idea of how few I actually see.

The Crab Nebula was likely a super nova in 1054 ACE. It was recorded by the Chinese and in cave paintings in South America.

It was seen during the day. This should give you an idea of what one might expect.

seds.org...
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu...