Liked on YouTube: Betelgeuse Is Continuing To Dim: What' s Really Happening?

Betelgeuse Is Continuing To Dim: What' s Really Happening?
From what it could mean, to the various reasons for this phenomenon happening at all, join me as we explore betelgeuse continuing to DIM! What' s really happening? Out in space in the Orion constellation, there is a very bright star in our night sky known Betelgeuse. To put it most simply, it is a red supergiant, and one that dwarfs many others stars in the sky. Such as the big star known as Rigel which it outsizes in a rather significant way. Mainly because this star is 1.3 BILLION kilometers long. That's basically three times the size of Rigel, which for the record is 97 million kilometers long. So yeah, definitely not a small star. For a comparison, if some kind of cosmic event somehow dropped this massive star into our own solar system and replaced our own sun with it (which obviously won't happen but why ruin the moment here?), the mass of Betelgeuse would basically destroy everything from the point of the sun all the way until Jupiter more than likely. So you should be glad this isn't a thing that likely will happen...hopefully. Betelgeuse is also the 10th brightest star in the sky overall, and it’s the 7th brightest star visible from most of the U.S., Canada, Europe and the majority of the Northern Hemisphere. What's that? How big is Betelgeuse compared to the Earth? I'm glad you asked! The Earth is about 40,000 kilometers long in circumference. Which means that this supergiant is 32,500 times bigger than us. That's a lot. Like really, that's a lot of mass for a single star. So yeah, that's Betelgeuse on a very basic level. But there is more going on here with this star than you realize. Including the fact that one day this star is supposed to go Supernova, and when that happens, it'll be a big deal in space for reasons we can talk about another time. But what's getting a lot of people's attention right NOW is that Betelguese is dimming. Likely in the literal sense, the star is dimming in a way that is clearly intentional/forced, and many astronomers are trying to figure out what's going on with it. "Wait a minute", you say, "didn't you just note that the star is going to go supernova one day? Couldn't this be a lead-up to that event happening?" A good question, and most times, we would say yes, as this would be an indication that the star was in the last phases of its current life and could/should go supernova at any moment. But, the problem is that based on projections of the star itself in terms of its life, it's not SUPPOSED to go Supernova for tens of thousands of years yet. Which means that this "dimming" is an atypical event, and one that scientists want to figure out. What's more, in a more recent report about the dimming itself, Villanova University astronomers Edward Guinan and Richard Wasatonic noted that while the dimming is still going on, it's happening at a much slower rate than before. Which just makes the whole situation even more odd. Now I'm sure you're wondering just how dim the star is actually getting, and that's a good question as well. I could bore you with talk about "magnitudes" or brightness, but let's just get to the heart of the matter. Over the course of the last few months, Betelgeuse has basically lost half of its usual brightness. And for a star to go from its normal shine to about half in a few months is very unprecedented in a star that isn't about to die. Also, to be clear, astronomers have been watching Betelgeuse for a very long time, in fact, they've been keeping their eyes on this star for over 180 years! And at no point in time since they've been watching it has the brightness ever gone that low. It's at record lows even, and when you plot it all out on a chart, you see just how weird this rapid dimming is, and it's got a lot of people in the science field scratching their heads. “The unusual behavior of Betelgeuse should be closely watched.” noted one scientist watching the situation. Another thing to note is that as the star starts to dim, its temperature drops as well. Since September 2019, the temperature of Betelgeuse has lowered by 100 Kelvin. If that continues, it could affect the star in a way that we're not expecting. Of course, it's entirely possible that this IS the path to it detonating itself and becoming a supernova. We just don't think this is the case. The life of stars is a very curious thing. As they burn very, VERY brightly in the sky, and that affects a lot of things around them. Take Earth for example. If our star burned less brightly, and thus less hot, our planet wouldn't be in very good shape. In fact, our star is quite literally perfect in regards to how far it is from Earth, the light and heat it emits, and even how much radiation it pumps out into space itself. But that last bit is another topic entirely. To burn like it does, it has a very particular balance of energy within itself. This balance is between the gasses it creates, and the gasses it burns.
via YouTube https://youtu.be/M9eCXmkmtpo