Is Betelgeuse going to Explode | Betelgeuse going to Supernova | Truth behind it | Alpha Orionis

Credits: Britannica

Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star and 10th brightest star in the night sky, situated 548 lys away from the Sun in the Orion Constellation. Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars that can be seen through naked eyes in the night sky, if it was placed at the center of Solar System, it will engulf orbits of Mercury, Venus , Earth, Mars and possibly Jupiter also, as its surface will lie between Jupiter and Asteroid belt. If compared to Sun, its radius will be 764 times more than that of the Sun and its mass is approximately 11.6 times that of the Sun.

Having distinctive orange red color and position with Orion constellation it is easy to observe with naked eyes in the night sky, it is consider to be a single isolated runaway star that is not associated with any cluster or group of stars and its birth place is also undetermined.

FACTS

• Betelgeuse was the first extra solar star to measured its photosphere angular size i.e. 0.042 to 0.056 arcsecond, this range determined it's non sphericity, pulsation and appearance varying at different wavelength.
• Betelgeuse is covered with a complex envelop of star dust approximately 250 times larger than the Betelgeuse itself which is being caused by mass losses from the star itself.
• An amazing fact about Betelgeuse is that it was started dimming from October 2019 and till mid-February 2020 it has been dimmed from a magnitude of 0.5 to 1.7, but when it comes to infrared observations it showed that the dimming was not because of change of luminosity of the star, it was just because of change in extinction, from 22 February 2020 it stopped dimming and began to brighten again. Now the main question comes, Is Betelgeuse going to explode or not? So the answer is when Betelgeuse starts dimming, scientists co-relate it with the process of a star going supernova that's exactly the same as it was happening with Betelgeuse i.e. the dimming of a star and again starts to brighten. So it is not going to explode right now but Betelgeuse is in final stage of its life, according to scientists it can go supernova in the next 100,000 years. 
• The accurate distance and size of the Betelgeuse has not been found till now, In 1920, the first interferometric observation assumed its parallax of  0.0180''. This predicts the distance of Betelgeuse from the Earth around 180 lys, it predicts not only inaccurate radius but every single property of the star. After the many calculations and observations Scientists can say the distance of Betelgeuse lies around 500-600 lys.

CONCLUSION

Betelgeuse is a very large luminous but cool star which comes under the category of M1-2 la-ab red supergiant star. Th e letter M designated to its spectral type which means it is having low photospheric temperature, the letter la-ab represents its luminosity class which means it is having an intermediate luminosity, but that's not the complete stuff about  Betelgeuse, there is lots of thing about it and about the universe, to know about other interesting facts about our universe and to connect with us you can check into our Instagram page by clicking on the Instagram icon in the Social Plugins section.