One of our members who can't be bothered to post this, asked me to do it
Star about to explode
so I have.
Star about to explode
so I have.
Star going supernova, man the telescopes
- Thread starter Deckerd
- Start date
daymn, I don't have a telescope or anything!!
It's 21 million light years away. Colour me unimpressed. Wake me if Betelgeuse or Eta Carinae goes pop.
I think even folks like me, who live under rocks, will notice when Betelgeuse goes supernova.
Isn't it likely to be as bright as moonlight?
Isn't it likely to be as bright as moonlight?
Not to mention, how much gamma radiation would we get off a star going nova that close to us? And would we get any advance warning signs if this was going to be a problem?
Well, it's bound to have happened at SOME point in the last four billion years. Life seems to have avoided mass extinction due to cosmic radition in that time. The Crab Nebula went off just under a thousand years ago and was observed by the astronomers of the time (even in daylight!) and THAT one was right next door, at 6500 ly away.
Mark
Mark
Meh. Supernovae are children's playthings. Superclusters is where the cool kids are at.
No, you won't. You might notice that it went supernova a few hundred years in the past though.
And I just discovered something interesting: Apparently scientists can't quite agree on how far from us it is.
However, with distance estimates in the last century that have ranged anywhere from 180 to 1,300 light years from Earth, calculating its diameter, luminosity and mass have proven difficult. Betelgeuse is currently thought to lie around 640 light years away...
Something doesn't have to be a mass extinction event to still cause problems. I mean, look at what even sunspots do to electronics.
Then we need to harden our electronics against sunspots. If Air Force One can be hardened against a direct EMP, then everything else can be too.
I wish I had my super-binoculars over here, but I left them in the UK when I moved.
Our infrastructure needs to be hardened against a lot of things, to be honest; it's practically stuck in the 1970s.
But will it destroy the galaxy?
How would it do that? No it wouldin, i'd make a show. Wouldn't want to be a couple tens of ly from it though.
I can't believe you're lecturing us on the nature of light and time. From our perspective, Betelgeuse will blow up when the light from that explosion reaches us. That is all.
[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJp86_tj9KQ[/yt]
