You might be wondering why I haven’t jumped on the Betelgeuse “dimming” bandwagon and yelled from the roof top “The sky is falling!” err sorry, “Betelgeuse is about to go supernova!” Well, I decided to tap the brakes and take a wait and see approach. At least for a little bit. Often these types of reports travel at the speed of light only to fizzle out leaving people to later ask “Hey, whatever became of that star that they said dimmed a little bit, and might even explode?”
The reality is Betelgeuse is destined to go supernova and astronomically speaking it’s due to happen pretty soon. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star and starting back in October of last year the star noticeably dimmed in brightness, thus far by a factor of 2.5 from magnitude +0.5 to +1.5. This is not totally out of the realm of possibility since Betelgeuse is a variable star whose brightness fluctuates from +0.0 to +1.3 but it was enough for astronomers to sit up and take notice.
The star is 650 to 700 light years from Earth, the second brightest star in the constellation Orion behind Rigel and is the 11th brightest star in the night sky. As luck would have it Orion is perfectly placed these February nights for you to step out after dark, and if you are in the U.S., face south. You’ll find Orion fairly high in the southeast and crossing the meridian around 9 p.m.