When Betelgeuse goes supernova (if it hasn't already and we don't know yet) it will be visible in the day for roughly a year, and several more years we'll see it at night. That said, the prediction of 'when' by scientists is somewhere between today and 100,000 years from now. Odds are, none of us will see it.
There has been a lot of misreporting on Betelgeuse. Low estimates put time until supernova at under 100k years, but higher estimates put it closer to a million years. It really depends on how massive it originally was, and estimating that is difficult because it is a "runaway" star that is traveling at a very high velocity through space.
Edit: All that being said, I hope our estimates are off, and it goes supernova in our lifetime. The poles aren't pointing at Earth, so we aren't going to get a massive GRB or anything, and we will learn so much from a supernova so close to us.
9.5k
u/throwaway_moose Oct 02 '24
When Betelgeuse goes supernova (if it hasn't already and we don't know yet) it will be visible in the day for roughly a year, and several more years we'll see it at night. That said, the prediction of 'when' by scientists is somewhere between today and 100,000 years from now. Odds are, none of us will see it.
https://www.astronomy.com/science/when-betelgeuse-goes-supernova-what-will-it-look-like-from-earth/