Episode 606: Betelgeuse Is Dimmer Than We've Ever Seen It
Over the last weekend, astronomy Twitter started noting that the red giant Betelgeuse, the prominent shoulder of Orion was looking visibly dimmer in the sky, and I had a few people reach out to me and ask me if it was really happening and if I knew what was going on.
This is exciting, of course, because Betelgeuse is living on borrowed time, and it could explode as a supernova any day now. Or, it might not detonate for another 100,000 years. We just don’t know.
What’s Betelgeuse up to? Is this a sign that it’s about to explode? And what would it mean if it did?
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Team: Fraser Cain - @fcain / [email protected]
Karla Thompson - @karlaii / https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEItkORQYd4Wf0TpgYI_1fw
Chad Weber - [email protected]
References:
https://twitter.com/starstrickenSF/status/1209207523179237376
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/what-will-happen-when-betelgeuse-explodes-df5b04164b2
https://www.eso.org/public/usa/images/potw1726b/
https://hubblesite.org/image/4027/gallery
https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso0708a/
http://www.astronomerstelegram.org/?read=13341
https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/feature1.shtml
https://twitter.com/starstrickenSF/status/1209242710281986048
https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~gk/A403/pulse.pdf
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01852.pdf
https://aasnova.org/2018/01/03/astrophysics-of-red-supergiants/
https://neutrinos.fnal.gov/sources/supernova-neutrinos/
https://snews.bnl.gov/
https://researchblog.duke.edu/2014/01/22/supernova-explosion-in-m82-exciting-but-no-neutrinos/
https://aasnova.org/2018/04/20/capturing-neutrinos-from-a-stars-final-hours/
https://www.phys.hawaii.edu/~jgl/nuastron.html