Potential Evidence That Betelgeuse May Go Supernova Early After All

exactly is happening inside the star and so let's discuss this new study and some of the follow-ups in some of the additional explanations and I guess let's quickly start with the obvious so in the last four years this star right here really surprised the scientists first in 2019 it dramatically dimmed in brightness at first this was obviously unexplained and was definitely something that surprised quite a

lot of Sciences but various follow-up studies revealed that it was most likely due to a massive Cloud released from the Star surface that was basically in a position blocking the star from our view now the actual origin of this particular cloud is still unclear and it was even suggested by one one of the previous studies that might have been a result of some kind of a

really large object like a planet disturbing the surface of the star or even being swallowed by the star either way though at the moment this is still the best explanation then very recently and specifically in the last few months additional follow-ups revealed the opposite now the star is almost 50 percent brighter than its average and that is definitely something nobody expected in other words its Luminosity

increased so much that it's one of the brightest stars in the night skies and that by itself obviously cannot be explained by something like this but it's also important to understand that changing brightness for stars is actually pretty common a lot of different stars go through these cycles of bright dim bright dim for a lot of various reasons here's an example of a typical mirror variable

based on the first discovered such star Mira that you see right there it's actually sometimes even known as The Star of Wonder and this unusual variability was discovered back in 1596. in this case though in this particular star changes is in brightness because it actually expands and contracts quite regularly producing the observations you see right here and this happens with a lot of different stars out

there this is actually really really common even some of the nearby Stars such as algol very often change in brightness by quite a lot and actually at least 30 different stars that you can see in the nice guys without the help of any telescope usually produce these variable observations and Beetlejuice is one of these stars but in this case it basically had this unusual change that

nobody expected that was dramatically different from everything else so here's for example observations from the last 20 years or so and you can see that both the dip and some of the recent brightness are very different from what we typically observe and because the star is obviously one of the candidates for one of the nearest Supernova to us it became super exciting as a potential Target

follower of scientists specializing in Supernova and in aging stars and so because of either wishful thinking or because it would be super exciting different scientific teams wanted to actually find more clues of whether Beetlejuice is going to go supernova anytime soon for example certain studies looked at ancient reports of Beetlejuice realizing that in the past in the last 3000 years it was much brighter and much

more yellowish orange now it's a lot more red which basically means that it aged quite a lot in just the last two thousand years with the recent changes in brightness only providing more hints that maybe something is about to happen but the thing is these ancient manuscripts along with its recent observations is just not enough evidence to prove anything and several additional papers we've discussed previously

have even suggested that there's quite a high possibility that this star is actually not going to explode for at least a million years for example one explanation involved Beetlejuice swallowing something extremely large possibly another partner that ended up speeding up the Stars so much that it started producing these unusual effects this would have happened thousands of years ago or possibly even millions of years ago but

this did not stop scientists from trying to prove that well maybe it is going to go supernova and that's what this recent paper does by discovering something nobody has actually thought of before or I guess maybe just not to this extent here the analyzed video juices periods in terms of variability in other words they analyzed various Cycles when the Beetlejuice changes brightness and here we know

that there are at least four cycles each lasting 185 days 230 420 and 2200 these are not very exact and they're sort of semi-regular but that's how the star usually changes its brightness and it turns out that the longest period the one that's 2200 days long whose origin is actually unknown to us could potentially be the fundamental mode representing the main cycle for beetlejuice's pulsations and

if it's the main mode it does actually change its overall Age and what we already know about its Evolution and so here by ignoring previous assumptions including swallowed Stars the scientists decided to compare all four periods in the process discovering that these positions are very similar to what we usually see in a much later stage of what's known as core carbon burning or basically when the

star starts burning carbon usually near the end of its life but more intriguingly their model seems to actually explain that dimming event we saw in 2019 really well including the brightening event right now and if this is correct and if the scientists found the explanation from beetroduces unusual brightening and dimming it makes Beetlejuice the next candidate for what's known as Galactic Supernova or in essence the

event we've all been waiting for the event that would produce the nearest Supernova to planet Earth in the last few centuries but as always extraordinary claims extraordinary evidence and so on and so forth so is this actually what's happening or is this something that's going to be disproven pretty quickly well at the moment there's only been one follow-up the one that you can actually once again

find in the description and it does discover certain potential mistakes suggesting that maybe this is not what's happening after all obviously this is something that's going to be discussed for many months but let's just for now at least assume that maybe it does happen when is it going to happen what's going to happen and should we start buying popcorn well the bad news here is that

um yeah it will still probably take a while that process of carbon burning might still take hundreds of years and when it's finished it will take at least 30 to 40 years before the star is ready to go supernova so possibly a few centuries from now at least and let's assuming that the actual calculations are all correct and that nobody finds any disagreements with this proposition

but as I mentioned there's already one at least but once again let's assume that it does go supernova so what's then is it going to be dangerous should we actually prepare for something or is it basically going to be just a kind of a firework well if it does explode in the next few hundreds of years or even in the next few decades we have pretty

much nothing to worry about because the star is pretty far away because it's over 550 light years away from us we we're only going to have some effects from this explosion the first thing we're going to detect is going to be a huge range hour of various neutrinos normally we detect one or two in this case we're going to be seeing Millions if not billions all

coming from the same direction but none of these will affect us in any way and following this we're going to suddenly realize that there is a really bright object in the night skies and even in the daylight within about one or two weeks is going to become just as bright as the full moon it will probably maintain its brightness for at least a few weeks and

within about 6 months we're still going to see it to some extent but it's mostly going to resemble a really bright star a star that's going to become dimmer and dimmer every week and eventually disappear into nothingness and more importantly the iconic shoulder of Orion within about a year is going to be gone completely instead it's actually going to be a neutron star but it's going

to be very difficult to see it in any frequency except for maybe x-rays but what about things like radiation or even though Beetlejuice Supernova is going to produce a lot of plasmic rays in the atmosphere of planet Earth is going to block most of them and so even though there might be some change to the ozone layer overall is going to be very miniscule the superno

is also going to make quite a lot of radioactive elements such as iron that in the next few millions of years is going to get deposited on the planet and possibly even integrated into various types of Life previous samples from various sediments have actually already discovered signs of supernova happening millions of years ago but because the distance is still pretty far the amount is going to

be very small and it's going to have no effect on the planet whatsoever it is going to be one of those things that maybe a future archaeologist can kind of ponder about which basically means that the supernome is really going to be just more of a Marvel and as I mentioned a firework not really a hazard in any way but because currently we're basically in the

Golden Age of astronomy or practically the peak of astronomical research which will hopefully keep going for quite a while obviously quite a lot of scientists are really hoping to see this star real super know as well so we can study all of this in as much detail as possible but unfortunately maybe it might not happen after all and maybe what we're actually seeing is going to

be explained in some other way feature studies will tell us more but until then thank you for watching subscribe share this with someone who loves learning about space and Sciences come back tomorrow to learn something else and maybe support this channel on patreon by Julian Channel membership or by buying the wonderful person t-shirt you can find in the description stay wonderful I'll see you tomorrow and

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