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What Will the Betelgeuse Supernova Be Like – and Will It Hurt Us?
When Beetlejuice goes off, it's going to be the show of a lifetime. But it’s not going to hurt us.
Our own Sun will outlive multiple generations of such giants, and red dwarfs, the smallest stars in the universe, can stretch for trillions of years at a time. Estimates based on the mass of Betelgeuse, its rotation rate, the group of stars it was born with, and the amount of metals we can measure in the upper layers of its atmosphere, all suggest that it's somewhere in the neighborhood of a few hundred thousand years from now, it's going to go supernova. Because we're talking about a giant star turning itself into an uncontrolled nuclear bomb and detonating with enough energy to overwhelm an entire galaxy's worth of starlight.
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