The Betelgeuse Supernova

Astronomers have been waiting for this for a long time, and at some time in the not so distant future the brilliant red star in the constellation Orion will explode. What will it look like? Betelgeuse is so big and close its surface can be resolved with the Hubble Space Telescope! What we know. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star located about 590 light years from Earth. If you were to replace our sun with this star, its outer surface would be located at about the orbit of Jupiter, but it is a variable star and its diameter has been directly measured to vary from about the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Saturn. It has an average luminosity of about 120,000 times our sun's output. It's mass is between 8 and 17 times the mass of our sun. It is surrounded by ejected shells of gas that extend out to 1400 AU (1 AU = Earth's orbit distance from the sun), with a plasma gas shell extending to 200 AU. The dust shell indicates that Betelgeuse has been going through a period of mass loss that may amount to 3% of our sun's mass every 10,000 years. It is no longer supplying most of its energy by fusing hydrogen to helium in its core, but is now in an advanced stage of life where hydrogen fusion is occurring in a shell surrounding the core. The helium ash is forming a large dense core about the size of Earth which will eventually get hot enough to fuse helium into heavier elements. By that time it will be within a few hundred thousand years of its end-of-life. For a star of this ma...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news