Betelgeuse Betelgeuse Betelgeuse

Maybe this is happening...

Interesting article. Thanks !

Interesting,... So at 700 light-years away, that’s old news...

For all we know... Betelgeuse already went supernova 350 years ago,... and we won’t know it for another 350 years before we find out.

Don't blink for the next 100,000 years, you don't want to miss that supernova!

Ok,... I won’t...

Being only 650-700 light years away... that’s pretty close for a super nova...

..."Whenever Betelgeuse does blow up, our planet Earth is too far away for this explosion to harm, much less destroy, life on Earth. Astrophysicists say we'd have to be within 50 light-years of a supernova for it to harm us. Betelgeuse is nearly 10 times this distance.Feb 4, 2021"...

Wheeeew....that was close

That post reminds me of a past CR4 member, case491 who had posted a good comparison...

My sister teaches junior high science. She uses this 1,000 yard walk exercise to give kids a perspective on relative sizes and spacing in our solar system. It's a little outdated and still lists Pluto as a planet but it is an eye opener and very effective as a teaching tool.

I just posted something similar on the previous link on perspective.

"We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky." - Leonard Cohen, from the song "Stories of the Street"

According to the weather report, here in the southwest we are under an excessive heat warning. So maybe being plunged into an ice age doesn't sound so bad,,,

I'm sure climate scientists will tell us it's no problem, now that we have control of Earth's climate, we just need to burn more fossil fuels, and eat beans....

Could this be the phenomena that plunges the temperature on Earth into an ice age at the roughly 100k year intervals called the Milankovitch cycle?

I don't see how Betelgeuse could be connected to the 100,000 year cycle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100,000-year_problem

Well not specifically Betelgeuse, but the outflow from a star, like our Sun or perhaps a much larger star, could create a dimming of solar irradiance that could answer this question....Maybe there's a giant dust cloud that passes through the Solar system every 100k years or so....If so, it should be getting close...relatively speaking...maybe it's changing, becoming less dense, or the orbital path is changing...who knows

We're just along for the ride . . . . Enjoy the view.

Turns out we are...lol

..."While there is a Milankovitch cycle in the range of 100,000 years, related to Earth's orbital eccentricity, its contribution to variation in insolation is much smaller than those of precession and obliquity. The 100,000-year-problem refers to the lack of an obvious explanation for the periodicity of ice ages at roughly 100,000 years for the past million years, but not before, when the dominant periodicity corresponded to 41,000 years. "...

δ¹⁸O ..a proxy for temperature, for the last 600,000 years (an average from several deep sea sediment carbonate samples)

As you can see from the chart the dips refer to warm periods, and we are currently at the average high temperature between ice ages...going back 1/2 million years ago, you can see that something happened, the ups and downs were more frequent and less pronounced, which I would say accounted for the effects noted in the Milankovitch cycle calculations...but then something happened, since then, the ups and downs have been trending to more radical extremes, and at longer intervals.....

It seems there are a lot of possible explanations. Where there is feedback and delay you get oscillations. We have about 90000 years until the next ice age. Hopefully we will have it figured out by then, provided that congress acts immediately.

Some are under the delusion that we are in control.