About to explode in a supernova

Betelgeuse is barely 8 million years old or so, in cosmic terms it's the blink of an eye, hominids were already walking on two feet when Betelgeuse began to glow in the sky.

It is estimated that it has already been in its red super giant phase for 40,000 years, which means that it is not that long before it explodes like a supernova, a star as massive as Betelgeuse burns hydrogen like our sun does, but much faster, in just a few millions of years it exhausts its hydrogen and starts burning helium, that's when it starts to swell and become a super giant red star which is the current phase of Betelgeuse.

The gravity of a star is immense and it is a force that pulls all its material towards the core, but the heat and energy released by the powerful fusion reactions inside it pushes outwards, this is called hydrostatic equilibrium, gravity it wants the star to collapse, but the outward-pushing nuclear fusion reactions prevent it from doing so.

The fusion reactions are creating increasingly heavier elements that are accommodating like the layers of an onion, carbon, oxygen, silicon and iron iron can no longer be fused into a heavier element, so the energy of the reactions of fusion that was pushing outward decreases the hydrostatic balance is broken and the core collapses under the weight of the outer layers, gravity wins over fusion, in half a second, this is surprising in half a second the iron core that is the size of our moon is compressed to a volume 30 times smaller in half a second.

The star in the sky would look exactly the same but our neutrino detectors, which are very isolated places, will suddenly detect a wave of neutrinos coming in the direction of the star warning us that it is about to explode, the outer layers of the star accelerate its fall towards the core to a speed of one tenth the speed of light, when they collide core now made up of super packed neutrons the sudden deceleration creates an outward shock wave but is stopped by the weight of the rest of the material

This interaction is not even throughout the star, it is asymmetric, which produces an increasing wobble as the outer material reacts with the heat and neutrinos trying to escape from the core, this violent wobble of such an enormous mass creates strong gravitational waves.

Gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light, like neutrinos, so that would be the second signal we would detect hours or minutes before the explosion, the wobble begins to spin the neutron nucleus accelerating it until it rotates 10 times per second and this is the moment in which the star makes cabum.

Here on earth, 640 light years more or less from Betelgeuse, there is no danger and the spectacle would be incredible. The first thing we would see after hours or days starting to detect neutrinos would be a sudden flash that would reach its maximum intensity in five minutes to dim and return to normal brightness five minutes later as if nothing had happened.

It was the shock wave finally escaping to the surface, then the brightness gradually increases again until an hour later it exceeds the brightness of Venus and continues to increase, as the days go by getting brighter and brighter, until two weeks later reaches its maximum brightness at this point it will be the brightest object in the sky after the sun.

The brightness of the supernova will be so intense that it will be seen both at night and during the day, this maximum brightness will be maintained for more or less three months and from then on it will fade until it is invisible to our eyes. Even on a clear night three Years later, at this point Betelgeuse will be just a small neutron star a few kilometers across surrounded by the spectacular remnants of the explosion.

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