(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.
I read the upper layers of Betelgeuse are suspected to harbor gigantic convection upwellings a significant fraction of an AU in diameter. when each of these convection diapirs reach the star’s surface, the star sheds several Jupiter mass worth of mass in surrounding space. The star is surrounded by 7-8 discernible asymmetrical shells of material ejected during such events. When such an event is about to occur, it is suspected the star will drastically dim and then brighten.
