🔄From The Archive: Astronomers simulated what humans will see on Earth when the star Betelgeuse explodes as a supernova sometime in the next 100,000 years.
A plume of gas nearly the size of our solar system erupts from Betelgeuse's surface in this artist's illustration of real observations gathered by astronomers using the Very Large Telescope in Chile. If you stargaze on a clear winter night, it’s hard to miss the constellation Orion the Hunter, with his shield in one arm and the other arm stretched high to the heavens. A bright red dot called Betelgeuse marks Orion’s shoulder, and this star's strange dimming has.
That eventual explosion explains why astronomers got excited when Betelgeuse started dimming dramatically in 2019. The 11th-brightest star dropped in magnitude two-and-a-half-fold. Could Betelgeuse have reached the end of its life? While unlikely, the idea of a supernova appearing in Earth’s skies caught the public’s attention.
Astronomers used a software program called MESA+STELLA to simulate what humans might see when the star Betelgeuse explodes. They also included observations gathered during Supernova 1987A, which exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud. With all the speculation about what a Betelgeuse supernova would look like from Earth, University of California, Santa Barbara, astronomer Andy Howell got tired of the back-of-the-envelope calculations.
Life on Earth will be unharmed. But that doesn’t mean it will go unnoticed. Goldberg and Bauer found that when Betelgeuse explodes, it will shine as bright as the half-moon — nine times fainter than the full moon — for more than three months.
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