Astronomers argue that a recent study forecasting a relatively imminent stellar explosion misses the mark.
In recent years, Betelgeuse has undergone an unusual amount of activity, spurring discussion of when the fateful supernova might occur. In 2019, the star had a surface mass ejection, spewing about 400 billion times more mass from its surface than one of our Sun’s coronal mass ejections ,The giant star substantially dimmed. The period is known as the Great Dimming.
“I must stress that with our current knowledge, assuming the non-interacting star scenario which we have no reason to discard, Betelgeuse should be in helium core burning, and should explode in no less that tens of thousands of years,” Montargès added.An illustration showing how an ejection of material caused dust grains to obstruct the Earthlings’ view of Betelgeuse.
“Our team maintains that Betelgeuse’s time-until-supernova is of the order of 100,000 years, a number that comes from the helium burning condition,” Joyce added. “It wouldn’t be scientific to be more precise than that; there are far too many unknowns in stellar modeling.”Everyone agrees that more definitive measurements of Betelgeuse’s distance would be useful for determining the star’s true brightness and, thus, where it is in its life cycle.
Everyone wants to see a star die, which may be why people got excited about the “few tens years” terminology in the Saio et al. paper. When research finds that Betelgeuse will go supernova in a sooner timeframe than was predicted in previous papers—and centuries-long time scales are quite soon in stellar terms— it’s bound to create more buzz than research that affirms Betelgeuse still has a long way to go.But if you’re keen on seeing a supernova, you’d best look beyond our local supergiant.
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