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Betelgeuse to Supernova, Become a "Second Sun" in Our Sky?

Mar 17, 2011; 1:26 AM ET

There are prevalent internet stories that Betelgeuse, a supergiant star 640 light-years away, will supernova in 2012 and cause a tremendous amount of damage on Earth.

Another story out there is that Betelgeuse's impending explosion will cause a setup on Earth with "twin suns" like those seen on Tatooine, the fictional world where Star Wars' Luke Skywalker lived (see picture below). In "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope," Luke watches the setting binary stars of Tatoo. When Betelgeuse goes supernova, will it really shine as bright as our sun, perhaps giving us that famous double-sun scene from Star Wars?

Well, let us take a look at these subjects. I will start with a quote from Phil Plait, the founder of badastronomy.com... "Someday, Betelgeuse will explode. That's for certain! But it's also way too far away to hurt us. A supernova has to be no farther than about 25 light years away to be able to fry us with light or anything else, and Betelgeuse is 25 times that distance (which means its power to hurt us is weakened by over 600x). It's the wrong kind of star to explode as a gamma-ray burst, so I'm not worried about that either."

"At that distance, it'll get bright, about as bright as the full Moon. That's pretty bright! It'll hurt your eyes to look at it, but that's about it. The original post says it may get as bright as the Sun, but that's totally wrong. It won't even get 1/100,000th that bright. Still bright, but it's not going to cook us. Even if it were going to explode soon. Which it almost certainly isn't."

Wow, that takes a bit of the steam out of the ideas mentioned above. So, a professional astronomer with 10 years experience working on the Hubble Space Telescope, and six more working on astronomy education and running a successful astronomy website, shoots down these rumors. Well, he does leave the possibility that there will be sort of a double sun when Betelgeuse supernovas, but the chance of this occurring in 2012 is unlikely, to say the least.

That makes me question where and why these rumors began? I will take a look into the origins of these rumors and blog about them. I ask you to share with me what you know about these ideas. Please log on to facebook and tell me what you think.

A little research tells me that some of these rumors started because the impending supernova confirms the Mayan calendar's prediction of Armageddon in 2012. Also, the word "betelgeuse" is rumored to be associated with the devil. There is also hard scientific evidence that the star is losing mass, so a gravitational collapse may have begun. However, there is no evidence that the supernova will occur in 2012. It may take a long time for this supernova to occur.

Please support a favorite astronomy site of mine, EarthSky.org. This site was the inspiration for this blog and has graciously allowed me to use the image below.

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