By John C. Lynch
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer
The Orion constellation soon may lose its reputation for being one of the most noticeable groups of stars in a clear night sky, the new director of the Watson-King Planetarium said recently.
“Orion, if you are not familiar with it, is star for star, the brightest constellation in the entire sky,” said Towson University Professor Christian Ready during his first observatory presentation Friday night.
However, Ready said that Betelgeuse is 1,400 times larger than the Sun. While it is a bright red dot that marks Orion’s shoulder and was once one of the brightest stars, he stressed that recently the constellation’s outline has become dimmer, even to the naked eye.
The red supergiant star that was once one of the top 10 brightest stars and the brightest star in the Orion constellation, is now only about 36% of its normal brightness, according to the European Southern Observatory. Without Betelgeuse, man may lose the ability to distinguish one of the 88 constellations.
“Lately, something interesting has happened to Betelgeuse,” said Ready. “Since September of 2019 it has faded rather precipitously and it is now about the same brightness as Bellatrix,” the third brightest star in the Orion constellation.
Ready focused his first presentation on the recent dimming of Betelgeuse and how scientists are wondering if it is going to go supernova, which experts describe as explodes like crazy or become extremely bright.
Ready was a program coordinator for the Space Telescope Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He has worked as an engineer, software developer and spacecraft systems analyst for NASA, before settling as a Towson professor the last six years. He also has a YouTube channel called Launch Pad Astronomy, which explains how the universe works.
While scientists are excited about the possible outcome of the Betelgeuse, Ready offered caution.
“Now spoiler alert,” said Ready. “It’s probably not going to go supernova tonight, but it does have us wondering, what exactly is going on with Betelgeuse?”
Even though the star could go supernova during a time period from tonight to 100,000 years, the astronomers have been using ESO’s Very Large Telescope since December, trying to understand why the star is becoming fainter.
“The two scenarios that we are working on are a cooling of the surface due to exceptional stellar activity or dust ejection towards us,” Miguel Montargès, astronomer at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium and leader of the team that has been observing the star with ESO’s Very Large Telescope, said in a press release. “Of course, our knowledge of red supergiants remains incomplete, and this is still a work in progress, so a surprise can still happen.”
Since the science of red supergiants is incomplete and there has never been an observed supernova this close to the Solar System, space enthusiasts are worried about what could happen.
“I was concerned when I heard what a supernova was, explosions and debris flying everywhere in space, and how one could be going off near us,” said Nathaniel Suhr, who attended the event. “Now I’m relieved because the worst thing that could happen is that we see Betelgeuse during the daytime.”
During the presentation, Betelgeuse became brighter and brighter until it was almost blinding the audience, as Ready explained why a supernova became so bright.
“When the star reaches its iron core after just a day of exhausting it’s silicon fuel, the iron will no longer be able to hold the star up,” said Ready. “The core will collapse, and in about a tenth of a second, it will go from about the size of Mars to the size of Manhattan Island.”
After the star becomes bright enough to see during the daytime, it will disappear from the night sky forever, leaving Orion shoulder less, Ready explained. When the star disappears and Orion loses part of its outline, hundreds of years of history and stories that coincide with the constellation disappear with it. This constellation stands out from the rest because of its distinguishability and its brightness.
“The constellations have been stapled into my mind and every time I look up at the night sky, I see the outlines of them,” said attendee Hannah Balasubramanian as she looked up at the clear night sky. “To be able to use the planetarium to conceptualize what space would look like without Betelgeuse is truly an amazing learning tool.”
Ready said that learning is the reason that astronomers and scientists are intently studying Betelgeuse and the possibility of a supernova.
“The heavy elements like nickel and gold are generated from supernovas and escape out into space,” said Ready. “They travel through interstellar space and they eventually find themselves in a cloud, and that cloud will then begin to collapse and form a star, and around one of the stars there happened to be a planet, and on one of those planets there happened to be these squiggly things that evolved, and then these ape-like creatures evolved and got a little curious to find out where we came from.
“By understanding how these stars die,” Ready said, “we understand how we came to live in the first place.”