While camping, I noticed that if you look long enough at almost any star, you start seeing some tiny, subtle colors in that star. Even crazier, they sometimes flicker between more colors. In my case orange, blue and something like cyan.
Besides constellations, what else could you observe regarding starts, with the naked eye?
Betelgeuse will be going supernova in the next few decades and I’ve been looking at the light fluctuations.
In reality, it’s probably already happened! And the light just hasn’t reached us yet
Pretty insane to think about that
Will we get any of the radiation? Does anyone know this?
Probably not, but at most it would be detectable levels. Radiation drops at the square of distance, and there is a lot of distance.
550 Lj, but its only expected in 1,5mio Years
[15] R Neuhäuser, G Torres, M Mugrauer, D L Neuhäuser, J Chapman, D Luge, M Cosci: Colour evolution of Betelgeuse and Antares over two millennia, derived from historical records, as a new constraint on mass and age. In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Band 516, Nr. 1, 5. September 2022, ISSN 0035-8711, S. 693–719, doi:10.1093/mnras/stac1969
1.5 million?
100,000 years is the much more commonly reported number.
Still though, should interpret my “probably” as more of a “maybe”, haha
FTFY
As far as we know it might already have gone nova and the light still need to reach us, or it will still take millenia to go boom
I do hope it’s soon though, that would be awesome, for months we’d have like a second moon in the sky.
I kind of feel sorry for the solar system itself though. To us on Earth, it’s a bunch of stars, but to someone else out there it might be like watching God die. Not that I won’t enjoy the show.