Isherwood column: An eye-blink and it’s done
By Justin Isherwood
“You know Orion always comes up sideways, throwing a leg over the fence” -Frost
Early winter’s evening sky sees the return, as the poet predicted, of the constellation Orion, the hunter, he well-equipped with a bow and quiver. Whether compound or long bow is for a poet to ascertain.
Orion is an ancient agricultural marker, rising at the end of harvest, setting on a spring evening into a new warm field.
The Greek origin of Orion is predated by Semitic and Arabic versions, whose warrior goddess gives rise to Orion’s most famous star. Betelgeuse, formerly Yad-al-Jauzz, is the giant orange star in Orion’s shoulder or bra strap if you prefer. The flashiest star in the flashiest constellation, having two first-magnitude stars, Betelgeuse and Rigel, then on its belt the Orion nebula, an interstellar nursery of a thousand new stars.
What we perceive in the sky as a collection of stars isn’t the case as the distance to Orion’s individual stars varies from 24 light years to something of 2000 light years. The champion being Betelgeuse in Orion’s shoulder, a giant of Allis Chalmers orange, 600- 800 million miles in diameter yet a paltry 10 million years old. An infant star when compared to our old Sol who at middle age is five billion years old.
Betelgeuse, the giant, at 10 million years is a celestial time bomb destined to go supernova when its helium fusion collapses and the nuclear inflation collapses upon itself in the essential physics moment. By such demise is the universe we know expressed to the Periodic Chart. In such giants as Betelgeuse are the elements heavier than ironwrought, uranium to gold including a long list of short-lived exotics.
Main sequest stars like our companion light are Periodic Chart place-holders for the light elements, hydrogen through carbon, the next set of heavy elements is created in the reaction of slightly larger stars, two to four solar masses, in their final chapter creating elements oxygen through iron. What else for nature to publish is for Betelgeuse stars to do, the platinum, the gold, the uranium, plutonium; stars of 10-1000 solar masses, whose curtain call is supernova.
Supernovas are not good neighbors. Sometime in the next million years, Betelgeuse will go from being a big orange star to an eminence equal to the moon, luckily at a range of 642 light years. Likely visible in daylight, even though 642 light years away.
Supernovais where the science fiction of science begins. When a big red/orange star tries to out-do John Williams in orchestration and Steven Spielberg in theatrics. When a cuddly campfire of a star goes a very British blonkers.
Physics suggests the lethal range of a supernova is on the order of 30-100 light years, with some suggestion the radiation range could be three times that for a star of Betelgeuse size. The effect is pretty routine, just another straightforward cataclysm, what we know from Star Wars, the smithereens moment.
Really fun to watch. When a supernova happens, the gamma ray particles move out at light speed, followed by the debris field of that former star’s outer layers that gravity will eventually coalesce into planets with stuff like oxygen and carbon, a touch of gold, cobalt, lithium, manganese, silicon, aluminum, phosphorus – handy sorts of stuff are these the home and civilization-making elements.
The downside of all this is proximity, proximity to a Betelgeuse when it lets go. I have since a child wondered what a planet like Earth and its people would be like if there in the 30 light year distance, in our sky, was a Betelgeuse star. A star that science knows to be a supernova-type, like Betelgeuse – 10 million years old and on a hair trigger, if a million years counts as a hair trigger.
Knowing any day, any second it all could be instantly over, in a fraction every lifeful thing swept away. The atmosphere instantly lost, by an event not slow like erosion or climate change. An eye-blink and it’s done, everything. What would be the psychology of such a race? What would be its religion? Its wars? Its politics? Fatalistic to an unimaginable degree, or not.
I’m waiting for Steven Spielberg to explore this, if carpe diem already says it all.
At 642 light years Betelgeuse may already have gone supernova, some night to appear as a bejeweled new moon in our sky. This one can only hope to see. If to pause and wonder what and who was in the way.