The constellation, that is. From a UC Berkeley press release:
The red supergiant star Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the constellation Orion, has steadily shrunk over the past 15 years, according to University of California, Berkeley, researchers.
Long-term monitoring by UC Berkeley’s Infrared Spatial Interferometer (ISI) on the top of Mt. Wilson in Southern California shows that Betelgeuse (bet’ el juz), which is so big that in our solar system it would reach to the orbit of Jupiter, has shrunk in diameter by more than 15 percent since 1993.
This could be a cyclic thing, Or it could be the deep breath before the plunge, with the red supergiant Betelgeuse about to go supernova. At about 640 light years distance, the explosion won’t do damage to Earth (though a few years later, when the charged particles get here, we might lose some fraction of our satellites), but it should be bright enough to see in daytime, and will leave the constellation of Orion with a missing shoulder.
Gonna need a bigger boat.
Oops. Wrong movie.
5 Responses to “Is Orion about to go away?”
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But with a splendid expanding nebula
I want to see it go “boom”.
I _really_ want to see it go boom.
I’ve seen a lot of comets and that supernova up in Cygnus, but I want to see a really super-duper supernova once in my lifetime, like the one that made the Crab Nebula.
BTW… if this thing goes ka-blewey, does it generate a black hole?
> I _really_ want to see it go boom.
Not that any one of us is given a choice in the matter (with the obvious exception of Dear Leader Obama, he for whom the oceans rise or fall at a whim), but while I’d love to see a good supernova, I’d rather not do so at the expense of a well-known and personally favored constellation.
I still think that his “sword” was originally his dick, and that’s why the goddess Diana had the hots for him.