Why is Betelgeuse Dimming? With Dr. Edward Guinan

the night sky is one of those things we generally do not expect change with at least in our lifetimes the clockwork motions of the Sun and Moon the seemingly unshakable familiar state of the stars and constellations has only really ever interrupted by the occasional comet or meteor but sometimes it changes dramatically and without warning in the year 1054 chinese astronomers noted that a guest star had appeared in the sky and they recorded it the star was actually a supernova and that ultimately formed the Crab Nebula visible in small telescopes to this day this could happen again the prominent night sky star Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion noteworthy for its prominent orange color that can be seen with the naked eye is among the closest stars to us that is expected to go supernova sometime within the next hundred thousand years it's very unlikely for this to happen within our lifetimes but it will eventually do so and as a reminder of how unstable and variable this star is it has recently dipped in brightness by over a full visual magnitude well it's probably not going to explode tomorrow it does tell us that someday it will my guest today is carefully watching this very variable star and documenting this period of unprecedented dimming of the star Betelgeuse welcome to event horizon with John Michael Gautier [Music] [Applause] [Music] in today's episode John is joined by dr. Edward Guinan dr. Guinan received his doctoral degree in astronomy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970 he is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics villanova having been at Villanova for over 40 years dr. Guinan x' work focuses on pulsating stars binary star systems the evolution of the Sun and solar like stars and the search for exoplanets dr. Edward Guinan welcome to the program thank you now dr. your most one of your more recent things that you've been involved with is this dimming of the night sky prominent night sky star Betelgeuse which of it most of my audience has looked up at Orion in the night sky and seen this thing many times now what's going on here how fast did this dim like this we've been studying the star for almost 40 years and it's variable has pulsations variations of hundred days five years four hundred and twenty five days so these stars are unstable they're there you know they go out to almost they the star is that almost to Jupiter so it's huge and what they are is progenitors of supernovae a core collapse supernova where the iron core collapses in the star blows up so we just spent we have a program it includes more than banal juice but their losses are brightest one just to monitor these variations to kind of probe what's going on in the atmospheres of these stars not really to look for a supernova or anything like like like that so this year we were observing these for a long time do it with a colleague does mostly observe me his name was Richard wasa tonic he has his own telescope in his backyard at little 10-inch telescope and so whenever it's clear he can he runs out and collects photometry so this year we were getting kind of tired of it it wasn't doing anything extraordinary for a long time it varies but we kind of figured out its variations this year we decided to do one more year maybe to call it quits and then it was acting normally and then it would start to get fainter which is not unusual and October then fainter and fainter instead I was probably going to stop knowing and behave like it did in the past and then it just kept going each time I went out I said well this is it now it's near the bottom of as usual light variation this is probably caused by a pulsation but then it just went beyond anything it ever has done in the past ever you know like all recorded history going back to the 1830s we couldn't find it being fainter than it is now in fact it was observed last night from Philadelphia and it's near 1.5 magnitudes it's getting very close to the Bellatrix which is to start right across from it and I Ryan so it's it's been exciting spent a whirlwind I read the telegram in December just recording it was meant not meant for public it was meant for astronomers who to give them a heads up on collecting you know observations of bigger telescopes in different wavelengths Regents on the star because it was unusual usually dim and the event and cool so that was the basis and I got picked up you know by National Geographic and then it's been like in the news and we had to follow up it's called astronomers telegram follow up on the 23rd of December we're still getting fainter and now I kept saying to myself well you know it's near the bottom is gonna stop and it hasn't and and it still I think it's part of a kind of a more significant kind of pulse than it usually has but now I'm beginning to wonder because it's getting it has behavior now that none of the other red supergiant's have I haven't seen anything like it I still don't think it is there you know a precursor of an explosion you never know you know I keep an eye on it and who I'm at a meeting in Hawaii and I stepped out on the porch the patio here just to look at it last night it was really thing I mean I'm really looking for it it's a big exciting thing if it got bright real fast because that would be the signature supernova now it's worth noting here to the audience that 1.5 magnitudes that is visually discernible yeah you couldn't go out and look at Betelgeuse and it's dimmer than is so this is something you can go out and see with your naked eye now you say the field this is now an in territory where it is behaving abnormally for even a variable star yeah it's outside the limits of what it's done before the question here is the internet after all of the media attention the internet went wild saying does this mean that Betelgeuse is about to go supernova now we know that it's gonna do that sometime within you know relatively quickly in geologic timescales but could this really be a precursor to a supernova or is it just something that Betelgeuse probably has done in the past and will do in the future is that where we add on that I wish I knew I I believe the later I think it's not about to become a supernova in the next few days it's predicted to go anytime from now to about a hundred thousand years that gives you a wide window and that's the most of the serpent of Experts I'm tending a meeting in the American Astronomical Society in Hawaii and I've been talking to them ain't even getting you know internet questions to the consensus is that first of all no one knows what happens before no one has ever observed a supernova before it blew up they're usually too faint and they're discovered when they're on the process of blowing up so my Isis feeling still is it's part of just a an unusual episode of going on in the outer parts of the star starts convective it's a big bubbling star and it's just a little it's more more bubbly or a more expansive than it normally is but then of the supernova people who do Theory don't really know they think that one it's varied most of them think there wouldn't be a connection until hours before between the outside and the inside it's five astronomical zs-- away you know the inside is like where the Sun is and the outside of star what we're seeing is almost four Jupiter's so they're pretty far apart but one of the one of the supernova experts named fuller dr. fuller he thought in his models that it showed a dimming months or the explosion and but he's kind of an outlier in this in this but most of them are are not sure what happens what will what what the preview what the immediate you know event is or light variations are before it blows blows up so I keep looking at it I'm not a theorist I mean I know the outside I know how the outside the start works and this guy is just a bubbling you know it has a big convective cells hot material rising up and then subsiding and it's not a symmetrical star it has parts of it like stick out from the others on the other sections and it has ejected ejected shells before it has like bloom not not supernova but has ejected shells of gas that if you put in our solar system it would be out where Neptune is is it possible to one of those shells is just including the start rather than yeah anything going on with the star itself well the happy recent yes that's another suggestion is that was being done now is that there's a it ejected matter and the matter has cooled and that contains carbon and things like that's cool and the carbon has condensed into atomic carbon or carbon molecules and is obscuring the scar start because of dust obscuration we don't think that's one's right because we have we observe the star in five filters in the optical near IR the VFL to the visual filters the one that you're seeing all day all the attention because that's the one that everybody uses but we measure we have a filter set that measures it's titanium oxide it's a molecule that cool stars have and the titanium oxide is a measure of temperature and we're getting stronger titanium oxide bands I wish into indicated the star has cooled about a hundred or so degrees and also we looked we think the star has gotten a little bigger so we have other bands we have other we just don't use the speed filter because this it's messy it's a messy area of the star spectrum we have other filters and the indication there's a I think that we kind of roll out a dust ejection but you know who knows so that's that's where we stand we observed at last I my colleague that last night in Philadelphia and it was getting close to 1.5 1.47 he got and I was surprised at that we thought it bottomed that we keep thinking this is it it won't go any lower and then it surprises us and nice next few nice it went down no more so we're at a point where it's almost as right getting near the brightness of Bellatrix one of the other stars that defines that the rectangle the trapezoid that Orion is and if you look at Orion it normally villages is normally rivaling Rigel the foot or the knee of the store they're they're usually about the same brightness close to rightness so Rises a little brighter now it's just all you see is Rigel standing out you don't see basil juice standing out anymore as one of the brighter stars let's imagine for a moment that it did go supernova what would that look like from here that would be fantastic first of all what you would say is it stopped getting dimmer and suddenly its brightness of Gotha and a couple taste it would be brighter than Venus - for magnitude and then it eventually went Peaks one or two weeks into the explosion it would reach the brightness we think about on the magnitude scale - 10 which is close to the full moon so it would during that time it would cast shadows you probably read if you're good eyes you could read by it it would be like this if you had full moon out and that whole area of Orion would be just dominated by this brilliant like beacon of blue light and then it would start to fade months months and start to fade back and it would actually fade into oblivion like a year later it would be really faint and because what happens I'm the dust shell blows off and the gas shell blows off and the core of the star where the action is now where the nuclear burning take place is called iron is a core collapse that forms iron iron was unstable collapses and then the most likely scenario I heard people mention the black hole the most likely scenario for this star's mass is a neutron star or the other alternative is a black hole they would use keep collapsing to a point that's not it's the borderline of bending up as a black hole or a neutron star right on the border it's a its mass is about twelve times the mass of the Sun and it ejects most of the materials just to eject it right into space there would be no danger the things bagel juice is 650 700 light-years away so all this action if it did blow up took place 700 years ago but there'd be no danger to us at all it would just be spectacular to view it it would be you know would be and you can see it in in the day if it if it were up know this it would be that that bright it would be the brightest supernova there had been naked eye supernovas in our own galaxy this would be the brightest ever because this is the closest so at other ones take place in 1054 supernova listen how the Crab Nebula that people could see and in the daytime yes now I was gonna ask about that so in the aftermath like with the Crab Nebula you would have that expanding shell of gas from the nebula right right exactly and we would be able to watch that essentially in real time yeah yeah this has been done in the last bright supernova was in the Large Magellanic Cloud in in 1987 it's called supernova 1987a it went up to 3rd magnitude yeah she's no it's a naked-eye object and that star has now been studied by Hubble other telescopes and what you see is the expansion you see that the explosive the aftermath of the explosion expanding gas dust and now they detect it by the first time the remnant which is a neutron star but this is much brighter than that but that's the list and I saw that one it was three magnitude and I was very happy to see it this would be out of the ballpark and it would be no a thousand times brighter than Venus you know so this would really shine now that's actually kind of sad for me because I think it was thirteen years old at the time when that when that supernova happened in 1987 and I was like I'm stuck in the northern hemisphere and I don't get to see it but it would be rather sad to lose Betelgeuse though that's one of the prominent you know stars in the night sky mainly because you can see the orange color of the thing yeah and it was also as I recall as if you just build just one of the very few stars that we've actually imaged the disk of yes yeah it's so big you know being almost out so Jupiter and near enough that it's imageable it doesn't twinkle because it's almost has a diameter of what they measure it is milli arc seconds heads up diameter about 50 milli arc seconds so it has been imaged there's pictures of that on the web and it has little bright and dark spots on it it's net it's not symmetrical and those bright and dark spots make you wonder about that variability right yeah we think that's part of it is that the the theory is it pulsates it's unstable and you have these super cool super granules these giant blobs of hot gas connecting up that makes it get bright and then they cool off and subside and a new one will come along we had that we have our what we do with this for the data that we have we have 25 years of continuous data using these four filters we analyze it and then break it down into all of its periods and it has several several main periods five six years it has a the one that this we think this is this is 420 day which looks like a pulsation period that's what we thought this was about but it it bottoms out around now I made but not this deep it has an amplitude of about a half a magnitude and this is now getting close to one magnitude so we've never seen seen it so an amplitude so so bright so strong is there any indication of anything going on with Betelgeuse as far as exoplanets I mean could could star that so this violent and roiling could even have them or has there just never been any evidence of that no evidence it would have swallowed them up if it had it you know it would have been a when it was very young nine million years ago it would have been a B star an early type B star or late oh so it would have a very brief time as a main-sequence star that brief I merely mean brief like under a million years and before it to become a red supergiant so if there's planets there they were long gone they're swallowed up they're in there had been simulator by the store these stars live very they've it's a massive stars a massive stars a little bit very short like the spectacular life you know they go out with a bang but their lives they're really there that's where they're getting their energy their nuclear attacks rates are a hundred thousand times you know producing 100 hundred thousand times more energy than the Sun does so they burn their nuclear fuel at a very very fast rate which means they don't live long they die out hi someone asked me a question a few days ago here if you make the earth you know the sun's age suddenly was about a billion 10 billion years can make that a year like that pretend that that's so these stars have lifetimes of days weeks and that on that kind of scale so they're very rare short-lived stars that go out with a splash that's what will happen here someday and we have to take a break when we come back we're gonna go into a discussion of one of my I say probably the most intriguing type of star in the universe at least for me if you're looking at things like habitable zones the type K orange dwarf we'll be back in a moment be sure to LIKE subscribe and share the video and now back to John and we're back with Edward Guinan now doctor you also work with stars on the opposite end of the spectrum from Betelgeuse really these tiny very long-lived stars the red and orange dwarfs and lately red dwarfs have sort of fallen out of favor is regarding their habitable zone because it's so close and the stars are so violent early on and there's just a lot of problems there but type K which hasn't really gotten a lot of attention it might be just right might even be better than our own our own star system as far as habitable zones can you go into what what you studied with these yeah I'm attending or was attending they were Astronomical Society meeting in Hawaii and we gave a paper on this it was called the Goldilocks star K stars so these stars are fall between properties of the G stars and the red red red dwarfs and we've studied both of these we had we have two programs now the serve two programs going one called a Sun in time where we studied G stars of different ages and really honed in on their x-ray and UV emissions and then we did the same thing with M stars about ten years ago living with a red dwarf we called that one - to study what their x-ray and UV properties and wind properties would be and the reason is why why x-ray why UV and it's because this kind of radiation can it photos associates the ultraviolet radiation can break up sorry about that can break up water h2o into H and O and the x-ray radiation will ionize it so strips away electrons so that's what happens in our ionosphere as fur has a nice hydrogen and some oxygen so that being said it it starts to dissociate the the molecules and then ionize them and if there's no magnetic field the planet does not have a strong this is our conclusion no strong geomagnetic field the winds of the star which are plasma sweep by and sweep away it's called ion pickup they sweep away these ionized hydrogen and oxygen mainly hydrogen from the from the planet from the planets ionosphere and eventually that erodes away all the atmosphere of the planet and it's especially important when stars are young source that's why we call these in time the Sun in time are living with a red dwarf it's because when stars are young they spin really fast the Sun when it was young and you can study those by looking at G stories and the Pleiades which is a hundred thousand hundred million years old they spend like two or three day rotation periods and this creates a very strong magnetic dynamo that produces coronal x-ray emission and ultraviolet emissions the x-rays are five hundred to a thousand times the president's Sun and the ultraviolet emissions like fifty to a hundred times because the stars are spinning so fast during that time pair that's the same period when planets are forming they're being zapped by this high-energy radiation and if they don't have a magnetic field in place that is going to be trouble you know for the planet having water or even having an atmosphere so our initial work was maybe it was like 20 years ago when we handed over our data on sort on our Sun and time project to people who model atmospheres they modeled they applied the radiation we had this radiation x-rays ultraviolet as a function of time and they model the four habitable not for heaven but for terrestrial planets in our solar system and a Venus didn't last very long at all before it lost its water is this nearer and Mercury at really one of the theories is that mercury is an iron plant has a large iron core but one of the collaborators believe that the winds of the Sun may have been so strong than the X rays and UV so strong it even started to erode away the mantle of the planet I don't know if there's other theories why mercury has this large iron core but one of one of the theories is that the sun's winds and x-ray and UV not even into the blowing away the surface is it's doing it now there's pictures of Venus losing some of its surface you see calcium and things like that's still going on very tiny amounts so and you feel and Mars they modeled Mars as a paper out Nate the name is helmut la Mer who did the modeling work we gave them the data and they modelled it they came up with the theory that's still solid that Mars in the beginning had a Mars is first of all small planets one-tenth the mass of the Sun that their model was that Mars was once so preserve the old geological features once had water and oceans and a climate like our own possible even life in the first billion million and a half years and what happened is that the in had many magnetic field and what happened is that the core cooled and solidified froze out and it opened even though the Sun wasn't as strong as it was when it was younger it still was enough to to ionize or dissociate the order ionize it and then the winds of the Sun picked up those gases and blew them off so the the greenhouse effect on Mars at that time was mostly co2 and water vapor and so Mars cooled down they're hoping a cool down fast enough that some of the water remained behind this ice and looks like that's the case it didn't lose everything it cooled off so fast that not all the water was vapor the water was let in in terms of ice so it didn't get didn't get blown off so that was our first encounter where we started to work on planets was with the Sun and time program because it began is really a program in studying the dynamo activity of the Sun no as a function of its rotation to study that it wasn't really a program aimed at determining the habitability of planets so so then we were kind of finishing that program then we said well this picked the small star so we did the red dwarfs and things got it was very hard to get any time or any we worked with Hubble and x-ray satellites Chandra xmm it's hard to get time then on a program that was looking for doing x-rays or radiation of plants because the people at that time 2003-2004 didn't believe these the red dwarfs would have enough material left in their in their circumstellar disks to have planets so it wasn't until 2005 or 6 that expert on planet formation uh Alan boss wrote a paper on that red dwarfs would be perfectly fine and they would form Earth's and super Earths maybe not Jupiter's and it's that's the case there's a very rarely in in these stars around these stars so we've been doing that for 10 years and then we got no because of the if you want to get warm and the Hamill's own where you have liquid water around the red dwarf is rather near the store and the case of Proxima Centauri the nearest one it's it's one twentieth of the distance that Earth is from the Sun and when you factor aim you start to inverse-square law of light you know you it's inverse square law of x-rays and ultraviolet radiation so on that planet it's habitable you know it's uh its temperate the temperatures like Earth but it's receiving five hundred times more x-ray emission from its host star than Earth is and I wonder what you know what set means in terms of whether the whether the planet is has life on it or anything water owner has an atmosphere because this Proxima Centauri this is an example of the whole group Proxima Centauri is five billion years old very similar in age to the Sun and it when it was young because we have models of what it would be like it wouldn't be five hundred times it would be 50 thousand times there we she ation levels that the earth got and we're not sure and the models it's very hard to know you know what what would happen with those kind of radiation levels but the back of the envelope is more than the baculum models starting indicate that it would lose its water inventories and atmosphere and the case that you have what you're hoping for if you're looking for life is that it after the star after the host star spun down a bit and was as made magnetically active that it would be resupplied by unbarred meant with watery asteroids and comets or the other ideas maybe it was it was further out when it first formed then migrated in to where it is now so it invited the worst know the worst times of living near a red red dwarf so there's still a you know it's all hope but it's not a big hook that Alpha Centauri has has an atmosphere left there's always you know these these events could have taken place it could have evolved further out and moved in or it could have a giant magnetic field bigger than our own that shielded it from the winds that and that the flares and coronal mass ejections that probably proximate story is under under going and and made it you know made it suitable for life and this is the case for most of them most red dwarf planets you have to know you have to be near very cool suppliant to be warm but it's like you know it's like living to get warm you're like a nuclear power plant you know you're you're warm but then you're getting you know lots of x-rays and Lara lots of ultraviolet radiation which it will depend on the planet whether the planet has the conditions - like a menu sphere - to block the winds from encroaching into the planet and stripping it of all of its atmosphere now what about the the type K stars with their habitability now they seem to fall right in the middle or these can you envision that this is quite a bit better than the environment around a red dwarf oh yeah for sure we we think that we are happy with G stars the only case of life in the universe is a planet around the g star and that's us so there's nothing wrong with having a plant having you have a plan or LG g g star we think and they just talked about how m stars have problems in all the radiation levels the only problem we found with the Sun and which is a no higher mass is two shorter relatively short life time and kind of faster evolution that the Sun has then k stars the Sun has a lifetime of a six-lane sequence lifetime of about ten million years red dwarfs are trillion years or 100,000 billion years very very long life lifetimes but then you're you have to deal with the x-ray and UV radiation yeah what we pointed out is that you know it's hard to argue with with success story which is the earth and and complex life but the evolution the Sun the Sun is evolving the Sun is getting brighter and the earth is no longer is getting very very close to the inner edge of the habitable zone so in somewhere about a billion years billion and half years or even sooner it was our own greenhouse emissions will have a runaway greenhouse effect and the earth will lose its atmosphere first and then water and it will probably still have life this is like a billion years two billion years in the future but it would be what you would call extremophiles so things that like tardigrades would be happy maybe still living on the earth so one of the drawbacks with G stars and it's is just a the faster evolution that it has they they increase in like other milazzo T about 7% per billion years which is slow and we know it give gave us time but our time is running out with K stars you have there they're very similar and activity and x-ray and UV measures to G stars more similar than they are to M stars so what you're buying with a K star is time they've really much slowly and they have lifetimes of 15 to 45 to 50 million years and the other thing that is good my planet for when you go to Planet searches she stars are kind of rare they're like five percent of all stars or G star solar-type stars we're 13 to 14 percent are K stars so you're buying like more numbers to for planets to search the red dwarfs are youth there's 73 percent of all stars are red dwarfs so you're getting like two times more frequent case stars and you're buying time in terms of nuclear time before the star evolves to become a red giant we gave a case at the meeting where we had a star that has it has a nice planets orbiting and it's about point five point four a you this is a K star point point four point five a you from the iMac a five star and everything's nice it has it has a temperature tempered like our own it's getting 25 times more x-ray and ten times where UV it's not awful but it's it's it evolves like in the time it takes for the earth or the Sun to go from its birth to death which is ten billion years this star only changes 20% in its luminosity so you would have the whole history of our solar system and earth taking place in ten billion years in a star around this case star it would only be 20 it would only change is low-acid only change 20% and I have another you know 20 billion years two or thirty billion years before the star got large enough or luminous enough to endanger the planet so that's a case of case we were making that's many many many times greater than the star systems lifetime as far as as you said viability for life but habitable zones also change so is it possible that as the sun's luminosity increases over time is it possible that if we were still here we can just move further out how do we do that that's a good question there was that one there was that one paper yeah move to Mars yeah or or there was that one paper that that were they they speculated that you could migrate earth over very long periods of time further out yeah if the Sun loses a lot of mass Earth's orbit would increase a little bit but that's not gonna that's nothing that's not viable the only viable thing that we have a billion years no so no from those were miscible will even be here there you know Mars would be balmy by that point but Mars has lost so much of I mean I'm getting into terraforming Mars has lost so much of its atmosphere and water that you could never bring it back to earth like conditions that it once had you know once had earth-like conditions four billion years ago water temperature similar all that but it's it's lost something like 70% of its atmosphere and water maybe eighty percent so there's not much left so even if you heated it up and and the Sun would do that it wouldn't come back to be purely a habitable planet you could have parts of it that you could you know you could live on you could make domes and we're going to ground and there you would have water again water would run but it's it's lost so much that there isn't much to work with there was a study done a few months ago where where that's what the lanessa someone from NASA concluded we concluded that too that there is water left if you want to have a you know colonies you could mine the water the waters right under the surface is permafrost but - so you can have pieces of it or portions of it that would be habitable but you couldn't you couldn't terraform the planet and bring it back - you know like earth-like conditions because it just lost too much material in the three and a half billion years we didn't have a magnetic field what's the K type stars could you safely characterize them as so far as we know right now could you safely characterize them as better is it possibility there that there might be an exoplanet out there's around a cage - that is better and more conducive to life than even this planet yeah yeah there is a star I was thinking about and it was discovered there there was more than one it was discovered by k2 the Kepler mission found it and it has has eclipses all that and I think his name is Keppler 4:4 - I hope remember that right it's a K it's a it's a K 5 star the planet is is one of the top you know the top ten climates in terms of closest to Earth in its properties it receives about the same amount of Starlight as we get from the Sun and it's like it's point four I mean this is all my head now it's this point for astronomical units from the star and we think that's a pretty good target and so it's nine billion years old so it's could have life on it if it does the life would be maybe more advanced their own own own life so that's what G star you know you are stuck that day their only habitable for like seven to eight billion years really because the star starts to get bigger and and the habitable zone just moves outward and so this is what I'm just thinking about is that in this case the stars is nine billion years old and it's it's changed its luminosity has changed about 20% of what it was when there's younger and the radiation levels are not that bad means it's not you know it's higher than this then the earth gets from the Sun but not on all scale like you get with em with em type m-type stars unfortunately it's pretty far far away but there's going to a lot there's a satellite called tests that searching for nearby stars and they have a lot of K stars in their program they also have a lot of M stars in their program because they're searching for nearby nearby stars yeah and we have nothing there's no nothing wrong with the G star you know in a case note and they're there they're good I just don't have as long lifetimes as the case stars case stars that are a little bit more active you have to be nearer to them to be warm I have to be a to be similar to the earth you have to be 1/2 an au one half the distance that we are from the Sun because there there there dimmer stars there half a luminosity of our Sun so you do have to get nearer to them but not you know not on top of them like you do in am stars to be temperate to be warm enough to have liquid water that's what defines the habitable zone you are right in our own solar system earth is the habit of the inner part of the so-called liquid water habit alone is some people have is 0.95 some people have is 0.99 the earth is on the inner edge of that and that's because the Sun now has increased its luminosity 35% since it was first formed imagine what could be out there that civilization billions of years old around an orange dwarf doctor we are out of time thank you for joining us today and I hope you'll come back and visit us sometime and we'll talk more about your work thank you I'd fun thank you very much well not likely to explode anytime soon Betelgeuse will someday explode guaranteed and while it doesn't pose a threat to earth it will be easily visible from here as a very bright blue guest star which like what chinese astronomers saw a thousand years ago and after that it will form a nebula and probably a neutron star it just goes to show that nothing is forever even the universe itself and our own planet someday there will be no earth replaced with a red giant Sun and then a cooling cinder of the Sun as a white dwarf still circled by some of the planets though in a much changed form what a dynamic universe in which we live so quiet around here now that anna has switched off I know right I can eat any pastry I want what mustache wax last time I tried that ended up with two beards John why are you talking to the a person what I thought you were switched off I just didn't want to interrupt such a deep and meaningful conversation with the a possum such wonderful questions John what no one around here ever takes my side and on that note many things happening in the world of astronomy next week I will be joined by dr. Beatrice Villa roll where we will discuss her recent papers on the idea of mysteriously disappearing stars see you then [Music]

Channel: Event Horizon

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Keywords: space, astronomy, betelgeuse, orion, supernova, variable star, the sun, size of betelgeuse, betelgeuse supernova, crab nebula, solar system, jupiter, sn 1987a, large magellanic cloud, betelgeuse dimming, John Michael godlier, Event Horizon John Michael Godier, Event Horizon, when will betelgeuse explode?, Edward Guinan, When is Betelgeuse Going to Explode?, Updates on the Fainting of Betelgeuse, Why is Betelgeuse Dimming?, ASMR

Id: X5qQwxUCedk

Length: 40min 55sec (2455 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 16 2020