Betelgeuse To Blow Up Soon — Or Not 312
rubycodez writes "A wave of 2012-related hoopla has hit the internet about the star that makes the 'right shoulder' of Orion the hunter: Betelgeuse. Astronomer Phil Plait once again puts rumors to rest. The star will indeed explode as a type II supernova, and when it does it will be brighter than Venus when viewed from Earth, though not as bright as the full moon. It will be visible in the night sky for weeks, and could be visible in the day sky for a short time. But that event could happen today or 100,000 years from now, or as much as a million years from now. Since Betelgeuse is over 600 light-years away, its violent death will not harm Earth in any way, but will definitely provide a huge bonanza of scientific information about supernovae. As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime."
Soon? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Soon? (Score:5, Insightful)
To you and the other 17 people who have already stated this and who will state this, we know. But we don't mention it, because it's irrelevant. Some of those who state it are just pointing out an interesting fact, which is fine, but to those who are stating it like it changes the story itself, or the importance of the story, or the facts of the story--shut up.
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If i had known so many people were going to say it I wouldn't have said anything.
Hey, somebody was sure to state it, and getting it in up front wards off all the redundant posters (hopefully).
Perhaps not on Slashdot, but definitely in the general population the majority of people are so far away from understanding this fact that they may have already posted the same thing and we simply won't see if for a X number of posts or several life times.
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Well... if nothing can exceed c, then does the state of things beyond that really matter to us?
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Well... if nothing can exceed c, then does the state of things beyond that really matter to us?
Technically incorrect, and for some reason this is a common mistake. Einstein's theories dictate that nothing can go as fast as c . I'm not saying there is anything that can go faster, just that that's not what his theories say. Relativity says nothing about faster than c.
Re:Soon? (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, no: they are based on the observation that the speed of light relative to you doesn't change as you accelerate, which of course means that you can never catch it.
And of course your statement is incorrect anyway, as light is something and goes as fast as c. So do all massless particles, for that matter. So do chances in electromagnetic and gravitational fields.
Relativity states that to go faster than c is to travel in time. In other words, things going faster than c will violate causality. That's pretty much up there with point out that something results in perpetual motion engines, as far as strength of refutations go.
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You're entire point is basically the distinction between >= and >?
Tell me, how would an object arrive at a velocity greater than c without either reaching c or undergoing infinite acceleration?
Re:Soon? (Score:4, Interesting)
How do we actually know that the wave/particle/whatever I see when I glance up at Betelguese is about 600 years old. It seems to me that we would need to know a few things first, before we could calculate that:
How fast is the Earth moving through space? Not toward or away from Betelguese as in red and blue shifts of that particular star but just how fast are we moving through space in general. Can we look at one part of the sky and see everything red shifted and another part of the sky and see blue shifted and extrapolate the total speed from that (obviously we would need a series of measurements)? Do we know how fast the galaxy is moving, or even the speed that the sun moves around the center of the galaxy? For instance if I'm driving a car east at 60 mph, can we take all those factors, add them together and determine the total speed of me and my car.
Does that combined speed cause a time dialation effect (even a tiny one) on Earth? I know time and mass becomes distorted as you approach the speed of light, but I've never heard how steep that gradient is or if there is a lower limit. Would a hypothetical stationary cup of water cooled to absolute zero experience time differently then a similar cup boiling at 100 degrees (obviously the difference would be very tiny, but would it be there or is there a cut off)?
If the universe is expanding in the sense that there is more space between all particles (this was how it was explained to me: that with each passing moment the distance between all particles increases as the fabric of space-time slowly expands) wouldn't the speed of light be slowly increasing (or decreasing) as well. Would a lightyear 600 years ago be the same as it is now?
I know that the margins of error in determining astrological distance are way larger then any of these factors, and wouldn't effect the "about 600 lightyears away" distance of Betelgeuse. I'm asking more hypothetically. "Are these even factors?" is what I'm asking. What do we know and what don't we?
It's kinda hard to find the answers short of getting an astrophysics degree, so I'm hoping someone here with one could help me out.
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I'm pretty sure you're wrong about the last part. All those questions have been discussed and argued extensively for decades by people who spend disproportionate amounts of times thinking about them... to the point where the "answers" can be found on wikipedia. I'm not a physicist, so I won't answer you unless noone else does, I really like your set of questions though.
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The questions you raise are valid. We don't know how long it takes a photon to get here from Betelgeuse down to the nearest second. For stars which are fairly close astronomers can use parallax to get a precise distance. They do that by measuring the position of the star in the sky six months apart with the orbit of the Earth around the run providing a baseline. I don't know if they can do that for Betelgeuse. It might be a bit too far away. Beyond that they rely on measuring the brightness and spectrum of
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Relativity says that the photon coming from Betelgeuse experiences no time when it travels those 600 light years. So the travel time is zero. If we see the star explode in 2020 then it would have exploded in 2020.
IANAP but light does have a travel time: the speed of light is finite. However, the photon does not experience travel time because it's travelling at the speed of light.
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I wonder if something without mass experiences the passage of time when moving at the speed of light.
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JFGI ;-) Try "solar system" and "motion" as the search terms.
You can find some of the numbers for the Solar System's orbit at wikipedia [wikipedia.org]. Scan the page for "Solar System". Thus, in the "Sun's location and neighborhood" section, it mentions that our orbital speed around the center of the galaxy is about 220 km/s, roughly in the direction of Vega. At that speed, relativistic effects are measurable, if you have good astronomical instruments, but you probably can't detect the effects with your own senses.
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If the universe is expanding in the sense that there is more space between all particles (this was how it was explained to me: that with each passing moment the distance between all particles increases as the fabric of space-time slowly expands) wouldn't the speed of light be slowly increasing (or decreasing) as well. Would a lightyear 600 years ago be the same as it is now?
All particles are not moving apart from one another. Some are. Those within atoms are not, and the expansion of the universe does res
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Re:Soon? (Score:5, Informative)
Long story short, our full motion is measured relative to the background radiation. The earth rotates around itself, around the sun, the sun rotates around the milky way and the milky way is moving itself. In total we move about 0.2% of lightspeed, and time dilation is relative to the fraction of c squared so time goes about 0.0004% faster than at rest. Imagine you stuck your finger in still water, the circle it'd make would continue to grow and the wave would go on forever but get thinner and thinner. Same thing with the universe, the distance to the edge keeps increasing but the earth and moon isn't being pulled apart by space "stretching". All this is really on a much grander scale though, in terms of a planet 600 light years ago it's like asking if you can find your way down to the corner store without taking into account that earth is round.
The difficulty is in trying to get an accurate angle measurement, even taking pictures from both sides of the earth we only get a ~13000 km wide angle which is small when you're trying to see an object ~5000000000000000 km away. For Betelgeuse wikipedia lists the distance as 643 ± 146 ly so the uncertainty is almost 300 ly. If we could travel even a tiny bit in any direction that'd matter on a stellar scale and photograph the sky we'd have much, much, much better estimates on the distances. That said, we can still do a lot more from earth or near earth than we have so far and there's plans for far better telescopes than today, first up probably the James Webb Space Telescope in 2014 or 2015. Also ground based telescopes keep getting larger and better, even though the atmosphere limits them somewhat.
Re:Soon? (Score:5, Informative)
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We don't take pictures from both sides of the Earth - we take pictures from each side of the Earth's orbit. (I.E. six months apart.) Thus the baseline is (roughly) 300,000,000 km, not 13,000 km.
Re:Soon? (Score:4, Informative)
I would suggest you to read Einstein's "Relativity: The Special and General Theory". He explains it pretty well. It's available for free from a number of sources as part of Project Gutenberg (free on iTunes Book Store, 0.99 for the Kindle, ...).
Short intro to Astronomy (Score:2)
Another thing you are probably aware of is the inverse square law.
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Re:Soon? (Score:4, Informative)
How do we actually know that the wave/particle/whatever I see when I glance up at Betelguese is about 600 years old. It seems to me that we would need to know a few things first, before we could calculate that:
How we know the distance to Betelguese is due to Stellar Parallax [wikipedia.org] and other stellar distance measurement systems that use the parallax as a baseline. This is a system of measurement that is roughly the same what is used for surveying land using a compass and a transit, but applied to astronomical object.
The point is not that the light is so old but that the star is so far away that based upon our understanding of physics that it would take about 600 years (give or take some.... the number isn't exact) for that light to reach the Earth. Quite literally, Betelguese is "600 light years" or the distance that light takes 600 years to travel at 300,000 km/second before it gets to the Earth. If you prefer to use kilometers, miles, or furlongs for measurement I can do the unit conversion but when dealing with those kind of distances it is much more convenient to stick with either parsecs or lightyears as a distance measurement.
BTW, Betelguese is actually a "close" star in a broad sense, considering that the nearest stars to the Earth besides the Sun are about 4-5 light years away. It is still far enough away that even stellar parallax is not really working well and needs other ways to measure the distance, but "roughly 600 light years" is a good approximation. The main Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] goes into more detail specific to this star.
As for the other factors you are putting into there, the main thing is to point out the Einstein described that the speed of light is constant in all directions from all points of view. In terms of getting into the esoteric philosophical minutiae, you can plow yourself into metaphysics if you want to that is to me more like contemplating the existence of your belly button and what implication it might have if it is missing from your abdomen. Compared to the speed of light and the uncertainty of the measurement of the distance to this star, worrying about minor tweaks that could distort the distance measurement in this fashion is irrational and not worth the effort of refuting or even acknowledging.
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Thank you though for your info on Betelguese, it's a facinating star.
I'm not really contemplating metaphysics, just trying to understand better 20th century physics. I shou
Re:Soon? (Score:5, Interesting)
After the Big Bang occurred the matter was very very hot. So it looked basically like fire. But since entire universe was "on fire" and light has a finite propagation speed we can still see light just reaching us now from very far away places in the universe - Cosmic Microwave Background.
It has many interesting properties. First, as you point out you can measure our speed relative to it. Secondly, it has a very long wavelength which is due to expansion of the universe - the places farther away are moving away from us.
The expansion of the universe is actually very very small even on the scales of a solar system or galaxy and starts to matter on the intergalactic scales. It is characterized by Hubble constant [wikipedia.org]= 70 (km/s)/Mpc - for each million parsecs the speed goes up by 70 km/s. For comparison, Earth's orbital speed is 30 km/s and the size of the entire Milky Way (our galaxy) is only 30 thousand parsecs.
Yes, there is a time dilation effect.
Btw, speaking of time dilation effect, the scientists at NIST has recently built an atomic clock based on a single Aluminum atom [nist.gov] that is so accurate that they can see time dilation from Earth gravitational field. They measured the rate of their clock, than raised the setup and measured a faster rate - clocks slow down in stronger gravitational field and Earth field decreases by a small amount as you get further away from Earth.
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"I specialized in the arts not the sciences"
See? It's not a serious question; it's plain ignorance.
On behalf of physicists everywhere, I'd like to apologize for the pompous dick above.
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Not in our reference frame.
Betelgeuse Betelgeuse Betelgeuse (Score:5, Funny)
Just say its name three times and it'll all be under control.
We do? (Score:3, Insightful)
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
I dunno. Betelgeuse staying the way it is suits me pretty good. 1). Orion is the most recognizable constellation there is. It's supposed to be a man with outstretched arms, and well, it looks like one -- with his belt, and the 4 brightest stars. Yeah, they're his shoulders and knees, but so what 2). Betelgeuse is a bight star, and it's noticeably red. So it's a good example of star colors. Right next to Aldebaran, Antares, and Sirius, nearby and also red and blue (blue-white) 3). If it blows tomorrow, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy will soon be confusing. Well, more so. And that's a great geek book. Basically, the only people left out seriously will be kids. But seriously, Betelgeuse, is an important tool for teaching children. Not like there's much we can do about it.
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1. I always see it as a Christmas present with a really tight bow around the middle, so meh.
2. Algol is fairly bright, and very noticeably red, so we have a spare, plus the ones you point out.
3. The Hitchiker's guide is a classic, ergo there will soon be an annotated edition if there isn't one already. We can put in a footnote about Betelgeuse.
Insurance (Score:5, Funny)
The question is, can I make money selling Betelgeuse supernova insurance to the general public?
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The question is, can I make money selling Betelgeuse supernova insurance to the general public?
There is no doubt in my mind you could pull it off.
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Fast Tony? Is that you?
We all know you will sell your mother for a grape...
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Any question based around the notion of selling a worthless item to the general public almost invariably can be answered "Yes".
What about Ford Perfect? (Score:2, Funny)
Will we be able to find his home planet now that Betelgeuse will turn supernova?
Re:What about Ford Perfect? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know about Ford Perfect, but Ford Prefect may well have an issue with this.
What about Zaphod? (Score:2)
[spoiler]
the most important person in the universe of the total perspective vortex
[/spoiler]
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Its home is now Corel. I don't think the supernova will have any effect on it.
Oh and MS Word sucks in comparison.
Party? (Score:5, Funny)
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Marry that girl.
Betelgeuse To Blow Up Soon — Or Not (Score:2)
Come 22 December 2012 there will come another Great Disappointment [wikipedia.org].
Falcon
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Bah, everyone knows it's Jan 19, 2038 when the world will end. :-)
Only for those still running on 32-bit systems. For the rest of us, who have moved on to 64-bit machines, the universe will continue to exist for a while longer.
It's similar to the ongoing panic over the Dec 2012 "End of Time" in the Mayan calendar. The actual event is an overflow in the first digit in the 5-digit "long count" date. Using the Mayan base-20 number system, with 3 digits for the year and 2 digits for the day within the year, the high digit is now 12, and the date in question is when the oth
how long does it take after it blows for us to see (Score:2)
how long does it take after it blows for us to see it?
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That depends on how far away Betelgeuse is, and we do not know that very well. The best estimate is about 640 light years, with an uncertainty of about 145 light years. This means that it would take the light from the explosion about 640 years to reach us. The first sign that we will get, however, will be a dramatic increase in the number of neutrinos seen at neutrino detectors. This is because supernova generate neutrinos during the initial collapse of the core of the star. The light, however, is not
Let's hope that.. (Score:2)
It's mass calculations and core composition is as stated, it'd be a bitch if it threw a fit and sent out a sweeping gamma burst (think of a lighthouse but with a gamma beam a trillion times more intense than anything yet experienced) it might have lasted only for a year or so as the core of the resulting neutron star stabilized.
2012 anyone?
Re:Let's hope that.. (Score:5, Informative)
It is extremely unlikely that Betelgeuse will produce a gamma-ray burst. The current thinking is that supernovae only produce gamma-ray bursts in stars that have been stripped of their hydrogen envelopes. Betelgeuse still has most of its hydrogen, and there is not enough time to lose it before the supernova is likely to happen. Even if Betelgeuse does produce a gamma-ray burst the bursts occur along the rotation axis of the star, and Betelgeuse's rotation axis is not pointed towards us. Fortunately, we do not have to worry about a gamma-ray burst from Betelgeuse, because it is close enough that such a burst would be rather nasty for us.
Nearest black hole? (Score:2)
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I'm not up on this research, but I think it's a little unclear whether Betelgeuse will turn into a black hole. It all depends on how much mass is left behind after it blows off most of its mass during the supernova explosion. To say this is a difficult computational problem is putting it mildly.
For comparison, the Cygnus X-1 black hole may have come from a star that was originally 40 solar masses [wikipedia.org] in size, while the Crab Nebula's star may have been about 9-11 solar masses [wikipedia.org]. Betelgeuse is about 19 solar mas [wikipedia.org]
Even if it does explode with the full brightness (Score:2)
Even if it does explode with the full brightness of our sun, it won't look anything like those scenes from Tatooine. Instead of having all that light spread over a disk as wide as our sun, it will all be concentrated from what appears to us as a single point. Instead of looking like another sun, it will look more like an extremely intense electric arc. It will be even more damaging to the eye to look at it, compared to looking at the sun, because more energy is concentrated into a single point instead of
Insensitive (Score:4, Funny)
As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime.
My home plant orbits Betelgeuse, you insensitive clod!
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What makes this post so interesting is that you were the first person to say it.
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Um, no he wasn....oh, wait.
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>>"As geeks, we can only hope the core of Betelgeuse undergoes catastrophic failure in our lifetime."
>As geeks, and with the star over 600 light-years away, we can only hope this has already happened close to 600 >years ago.
As geeks we all understand that in our frame of reference Betelgeuse has not exploded yet, and it is our frame of reference that counts in this situation.
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No, it's exactly our frame of reference where Betelgeuse is 640 light years away, and it is our frame or reference where it might already have happened up to 640 years ago.
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No. This is a very common misconception, but it is not correct. Betelgeuse is about 640 light years away. (The exact distance is somewhat uncertain.) It takes a signal about 640 years (or more) to get here from there. So, in our frame of reference no signal indicating that Betelgeuse has gone supernova (as of last night, when I took a look at Orion). In our frame of reference Betelgeuse has not exploded yet (as of last night).
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Using that logic, I haven't slept with your wife yet just because you don't know about it. But trust me, it has happened already.
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You can't say a lightning strike hasn't happened yet because you haven't heard the thunder.
But you can say it hasn't happened yet if you haven't seen the flash.
Really. It's not "it's happened, but I don't know about it." It hasn't happened.
Relativity is weird and counter-intuitive, but it's the best model we've got so far; certainly it seems to explain how time works a lot better than our intuitive, naive notions about simultaneity.
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You must be joking.
"I didn't see it so it hasn't happened" is the kind of solipsistic reasoning I'd expect from... well, a certain subclass of people who are not exactly well-disposed towards science types.
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Not "I didn't see it so it hasn't happened," but rather "I couldn't possibly have seen it yet so it hasn't happened." This isn't solipsism, it's an accurate description of the way reality works.
I'll say it again: relativity is weird and counter-intuitive, but it's the best model we have so far for the relationship between time and space. There is no absolute time, only time within a given reference frame -- and on Earth, Earth's reference frame is the one it makes the most sense to use.
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Re:I can see it now (Score:5, Funny)
During a type II supernova most of the iron stays in the core and isn't cast off.
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this was hilarious
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You, Sir, should have posted nominously. Tha'ts it, you've won the thread.
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Real ironic or Alanis ironic?
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"...Betelgeuse Betelgeuse Betelgeuse...."
Is he here yet?
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Just showing that /. Continues to post old news...
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Yes. From the viewpoint of an observer passing earth in the direction away from
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actually, there is not an observed contraction but rather a rotation in the direction of the observer. Problem is Lorentz-Fitzgerald (and many textbooks modeling observation of near-lightspeed objects) only consider one dimension in the direction of travel, but the three spacial dimensional treatment gives the rotation.
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The whole observer thing is bs and because of limited imagination.
Just because someone saw it sooner does not make when it actually happened any different from someone a thousand light years away. Once both parties have seen it the further party would know it happened X years ago with X uncertainty because measuring distances is complicated. However on a universal timeline it happened when it happened and that's it.
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Relativity of simultaneity is not about the time when you see it. It's about the time you get after correcting for the finite time the light needed to get to you.
Re:Already happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Already happened? (Score:5, Informative)
Calm down, he's obviously talking about his own inertial reference frame. And within his frame, he's correct.
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"Like the uncertainty principle, all common thinking tells is is that the atom must have a definite position and velocity - but it doesn't because we can't measure it"
Wrong. You can't measure it because it doesn't. The UP isn't about your ability to measure something. Consider time/energy uncertainty. The faster an excited state decays, the broader the distribution in energies of emitted photons.
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You say that the uncertainty principle is not about one's ability to measure something. To what do you think this uncertainty refers?
Your final sentence also seems a bit bac
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At least you prefaced your statement with "wrong".
"In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. That is, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured." - WP.
Further reading - Embrace the horror [cracked.com]
Re:Already happened? (Score:5, Insightful)
We can't measure things until the information reaches us, so that is when it happens.
I think you are misunderstanding relativity, or perhaps just miscommunicating it.
Example: Some cosmic microwave background radiation [wikipedia.org] from the early universe is just reaching Earth today. That doesn't mean that the universe is young "now".
My understanding of relativity is that you can still use distance = speed * time to figure out when an event occurred in your reference frame. You just have to give up the notion that everyone else will agree with you.
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We can't measure things until the information reaches us, so that is when it happens.
I think you are misunderstanding relativity, or perhaps just miscommunicating it.
Example: Some cosmic microwave background radiation [wikipedia.org] from the early universe is just reaching Earth today. That doesn't mean that the universe is young "now".
My understanding of relativity is that you can still use distance = speed * time to figure out when an event occurred in your reference frame. You just have to give up the notion that everyone else will agree with you.
You misunderstand the grand-parent. What he's saying is that it's senseless to say that Betelgeuse has blown up hundreds of years ago if all the effects from the event can only be felt now. Its light will only reach us now, any (extremely small, imperceptible) gravitational effects would only happen now...if somebody who was closer to the event, and thus noticed it "sooner" tried to warn you about it...you'd only get the message after you've already seen the event yourself.
For all intents and purposes, yo
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So...things that are not experienced do not exist? I did not realize you had been resurrected Bishop Berkeley!
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Existance is relative.
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It's senseless to say that Betelgeuse has blown up hundreds of years ago if all the effects from the event can only be felt now
No, it's not senseless at all. You can only reason correctly about the universe if you acknowledge that we find out about events *after* they happen, sometimes *LONG* after they happen. Just because you don't know about event X yet doesn't mean that it hasn't occurred.
Example: Your twin brother, an interstellar astronaut, is scheduled to arrive at Star X today, Jan. 22. Star X is 10
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"Example:"
Is it really so hard to understand simultaneity?
"Your twin brother, an interstellar astronaut, is scheduled to arrive at Star X today, Jan. 22. Star X is 10 light-days from your current location. Suddenly you look up and notice that Star X has exploded! Has your brother been killed? Not necessarily, because you reason that Star X actually exploded 10 days ago, on Jan 12. Your brother, traveling at 0.1 light speed, was still one light-day away from Star X on Jan. 12, so he might have been able to s
Re:Already happened? (Score:4, Informative)
You can run a perfectly valid Newtonian clock-syncing algorithm when all parties are moving relative to each other at much less than the speed of light. That's the case here.
For any speed less than c, you preserve the order of events, and as soon as you say what the distance is, you're committed to talking about a fixed elapsed time because the speed of light is invariant.
The statements "Betelgeuse is 600 light years away" and "We're seeing it as it was 600 years ago" are equally valid. They're both approximately true for anyone who's moving slowly relative to us and Betelgeuse.
Someone in a relativistic starship who's racing the light from the supernova will report a shorter time, because she's just behind the light, and will truthfully report a shorter distance, equal to the (invariant) speed of light times the (her frame) measured time.
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There is another common misconception in your post too, not even quantum entanglement can transmit useful information faster then the speed of light.
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There is no universal time clock,
Actually, there is. In the sense of a standard reference frame that anyone in the universe can agree on. And Earth and Betelgeuse are moving slow enough compared to that frame that relativistic effects are insignificant compared to the accuracy of distance estimates.
Penzias and Wilson won a noble prize for discovering it. I'm surprised you did not hear.
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You don't get it - we don't need Science and Math to discuss these questions, we just need to refer to hundreds of years old questions philosophers never actually managed to settle. And its not the people who claim they can now settle those questions without even using science and math, questions many of the best and most famous minds of the ages got nowhere with, who lack humility - it's the people who want to defer to science and math. How dare anyone point out that Aristotle, St. Augustine, the Buddha, a
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But then, you never know with that guy.
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From TFA: With all this drama happening 640 light-years away in the constellation of Orion
"With so much drama in the one-OB
It's kinda hard bein' Betel-g-e-u-s-e
But I, somehow, some way
Keep freakin' out the eschatologists like every single day..."
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This star comparison video gives a good idea of the relative size of Betelgeuse to our Sun. Wish I could watch the supernova video from close-up - though there are simulation videos.
Star comparison video [youtube.com]
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