Betelgeuse is about to explode as a supernova, says study – 06/04/2023 – Sidereal Messenger
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A new study suggests we could be looking at the most spectacular celestial event in recorded astronomical history – in a matter of a few decades. According to a quartet of researchers, that could be the deadline for the star Betelgeuse to detonate as a supernova.
The star is an easy figure in the night sky even with great light pollution: the little red dot in the constellation of Orion, which also includes the famous Três Marias, which trace the belt of the mythological hunter.
It is a red supergiant, which means that it is a star with a mass considerably greater than that of the Sun that has already reached an advanced stage of life. Stars shine by consuming hydrogen in their core in a process of nuclear fusion. When the hydrogen is depleted, they swell, turn red and begin to fuse other elements, starting with helium.
So it’s not news that the star is on the last legs. The problem is that “the last” in astronomy is a process that can last hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of years. Hard to wait that long.
Between 2019 and 2020, the star underwent what has come to be called the Great Dimming – a sudden, unexpected and very intense loss of brightness. Speculations that it could be about to explode gained strength, but it turned out that the most accepted explanation was that a cloud of dust passed in front of it and temporarily obscured it. A work in 2021 even suggested that the star would still be at the beginning of its helium-burning phase, more than 100,000 years away from a detonation.
Four scientists now dispute that diagnosis. Hideyuki Saio of Tohoku University in Japan and Devesh Nadal, Georges Meynet and Sylvia Ekstöm of the University of Geneva in Switzerland have just submitted a paper to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society suggesting that the star is indeed in its death throes. . “We conclude that Betelgeuse is in a late stage of burning carbon in the core and is a good candidate for the next galactic supernova.”
It is estimated that a supernova detonates in the Milky Way on average every 50 years, although there is no exact periodicity. The researchers describe the remaining time for the Betelgeuse explosion to be “a few decades after the depletion of carbon in the core”, which, from an astronomical point of view, is practically now.
What they did was analyze the known four periodic patterns of pulsations that the star goes through and fit them into models of stellar evolution, treating the longest one as the main one, while other groups preferred to simply ignore it. This allowed us to estimate what stage of life she is in and, as a bonus, found a very good fit for the Great Obscure. The quartet also makes a modest prediction that can help corroborate their work: that one of the pulsation periods that seems to have disappeared after the radical reduction in brightness of 2019-2020 should reappear around 2025.
When this explosion takes place, Betelgeuse will be visible in daylight and will reach brightness comparable to that of the Moon. And the most peculiar: if these astronomers are right, it already happened. After all, the star is just under 650 light-years from Earth, which means we’re seeing it with a delay of over half a millennium. It is quite possible that we are just waiting for the arrival of the light of this splendorous detonation, in which humanity for the first time will be able to see with the naked eye the true nature of a supernova: not a new star that appears in the sky out of nowhere, but an old one that it has just snapped in one last burst of fury before disappearing from sight.
This column is published on Mondays in the printed version, in Folha Corrida.
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