(December 28, 2019 at 11:42 am)AFTT47 Wrote: The dimming is not an indicator that it's about to go boom. Betelgeuse is a known variable star - though this is the most it has dimmed in a long time.
The star is definitely on the verge of going super nova but that is in stellar time. Even a star as massive as Betelgeuse has a lifetime of about 10 million years. That's very short compared to the 10 billion-year life of the sun or 1 trillion-year+ life of red dwarf stars but it's still ridiculously long in human terms. Even if it's in the last tenth of a percent of its life, that's still a period of 10,000 years!
I'd sure love to see it happen but it's probably wishful thinking.
So,
