Could Betelgeuse Go Boom? 383
An anonymous reader writes "The answer is No. In space, nobody can hear you scream. However, it might go supernova in the near future, if it hasn't already. I wanna see that, even if it would permanently disfigure Orion. Ka freaking bam!"
New doomsday scenario? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Aliens better shield us with something.. (Score:2, Interesting)
I just read a story today about a lady who missed the Air France flight that killed everyone on board and then today died in a car wreck.
I'm not ruling anything out anymore.
Re:wow (Score:2, Interesting)
Betelgeuse is a very young star. It's only a handful of millions of years old. It is extremely unlikely for there to be any simple life around it, and no chance of any civilizations that didn't have the ability to travel interstellar distances on their own - as if they are there, they had to come from somewhere else.
What a show if it does... (Score:5, Interesting)
...rippling bands across the ground from atmospheric turbulence, razor-sharp shadows everywhere, with prominent diffraction rings around the ones from faraway objects. And a flaming rainbow streak, blue at the top, shading down through green to red, as it rises or sets in a clear sky.
If my calculations are right, it won't burn your eyes; it would be roughly equivalent to looking into a 4-microwatt laser, not nearly strong enough to be dangerous. A 10-inch telescope could collimate it into a 5-mW beam, bright enough to see passing through the air, if only it were dark outside. The Palomar reflector would collect closer to 2 watts, enough to start fires and such.
If it happened this month, most everybody north of the Antarctic Circle would be cruelly cheated. Any time from August through April, though, it should be visible in the night sky from just about anywhere but that same Antarctic. And yes, I'd be willing to drag myself out of bed pre-dawn for this.
This isn't exactly news. (Score:5, Interesting)
No Boom Today, Boom Tomorrow (Score:5, Interesting)
Are we really sure we're far enough away to be safe? I've heard before that a supernova even dozens of lightyears away would be a very bad thing for Earth.
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:4, Interesting)
How true. Not that it was ever Shangri-La, but Slashdot did once have some interesting and informative discussions on, you know, technical matters.
And making it another pile of useless shit like Digg or Reddit is precisely the wrong way to do that. A younger audience can be intelligent too, dontchaknow. Competing for the large but well-served market (if you can call it that) of the sort of drooling morons who argue in YouTube comments is ultimately futile.
Shorter: we can has good geek site again?
Re:New doomsday scenario? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's the first I've ever heard of neutrinos being deadly to anything at all. I'm understandably sceptical.
The neutrino emissions from a supernova would be lethal to humans out to a light year or so. Really. Cross-section is ~10e-40 cm^2, average energy is 1 MeV-ish. You work it out.
Re:Wow, Great Summary (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think they're gone, and lurk mode depends on your definition of it. If I'm sitting around with a bunch of geeks talking about non-technical stuff, I don't think that makes it lurk mode so much as everyday conversation. When we have technical discussions on here, the level of discussion isn't the same as a professional journal but it's very impressive for a public forum filled with a diverse technical audience. It's still a common occurrence where I see posts on here that give me insight on an issue that I may never have otherwise come across; there are even fairly profound anecdotes.
I also tend to guess that people remember the olden days as being better than they were. I think the signal to noise in replies has gone up, but moderation takes care of that. The stories, well, frankly I've been here ten years now and I don't remember a time where people weren't groaning at a lot of the stories. I wasn't as regular of a reader back then, but I certainly remember vitriolic replies to every Katz story I saw.
A lot of times I see people whine about stories on here, it's seems to be myopic assholes who expect slashdot to cater to exactly their tastes to the detriment of everyone else -- and expect top shelf journalism despite it being free and them making little to no contribution of any type at all. I've seen complaints about technical stories, hard science stories, what I would call soft science interest stories, stories about new products, lots of the stories about nerd or geek culture. There's really very few types of stories that seem to be without complaint; if slashdot went the blameless route, it might have three stories a week and it'd miss a shitload of stuff that's quite interesting if you're a person who's actually curious about the world. If you want to complain about the quality of the actual writing, then I suggest you submit more stories with high quality writing -- this is a user-driven site after all.
We should get rid of the AC -1 modifier (Score:2, Interesting)
However that doesn't mean that there aren't things that /. should fix. Your post is a case in point, a helpful realist perspective on the situation, but because you posted AC it stands at score 0, while the comment 'Having "journal pages" was bad enough.' unbelievably stands at score 2. The cause? Very simple, AC's start moderated at 0 instead of 1, which means even most moderators will not see them, so often they don't get moderated up even if they're good, or only after most readers have moved to the next story. /.'s moderation system is one big argument from authority. Which is a logical fallacy, so I guess it shouldn't surprise us that it yields disagreeable results. After all, if a post is good, it should be able to stand on itself, and it shouldn't have to depend on the reputation of the poster. Never mind the associated webforum reputation drama, which is less pronounced on /. than elsewhere, but still something I would rather do without entirely. And then there are comments which are more wisely made AC to begin with. /. has no moderation. It is really that bad. And there's a really simple solution. Why doesn't /. implement it? Is it really to encourage people to register? Well, given that most interesting comments are still, years since I first started to read /., made AC, I think we can safely say that it isn't working.
Unfortunately, there is no a priori reason to assume comments from logged in users are necessarily better. I've been here quite some years and members also troll, flame, post incorrect stuff, inane crap, and so on.
Anyway, to tie this rant up, to see the most interesting posts in a thread, you'd probably (statistically speaking) have to either browse unmoderated and be confronted with all the noise, or you'd have to click all the "n replies omitted" links and possibly still be confronted with the noise.
Wait a sec (Score:3, Interesting)
In your calculations you forgot the small factoid that it may be another thousand years before it goes supernova. It has brightened considerably in the past only to dim back down. It was Fox news (fair and balanced) that mentions it going supernova, not the paper presented at the meeting that merely states a 15% shrinkage and nothing else.
So,you might would have to drag/dig yourself out of the ground to see the Betelgeuse supernova. And most zombies I know about are more interested in brains than astronomy...
Re:Nova Post! (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously - If it goes supernova we should be a bit worried because it's close enough to drown us with radiation.
If that happens all our petty bickering on this planet will seem insignificant.
Of course - it's not certain that the radiation will be strong enough to kill off all life, but things will probably change a lot.
Re:Nova Post! (Score:3, Interesting)
Is that the sound it makes when a Hrung collapses?
Re:Gravity Waves (Score:3, Interesting)
The fact that light from the core takes a lot more time to reach the surface than from the surface to the earth has a completely different reason.
In fact, neutrinos aren't massless which means they are slower than light. The only reason the neutrinos arrived first is because of the way supernovas work. The neutrinos get emitted as soon as the core collapses but the first visible light only appears as soon as the shockwave from the collapse gets to the surface.
Disclaimer: I'm not yet an astrophysicist, but I did ace my cosmology exam yesterday