Second Sun for Earth

Betelgeuse is the second-brightest star in the constellation Orion, and the ninth-brightest star in the night sky, but it’s about to get a whole lot brighter.  In fact, when Betelgeuse goes supernova, Earth may be getting a second sun for up to a fortnight.  That means there may be 24 hours of daylight for up to two weeks! “This old star is running out of fuel in its center,” said Dr. Bradley Carter, physics lecturer of the University of Southern Queensland. 

”This fuel keeps Betelgeuse shining and supported.  When this fuel runs out the star will literally collapse in upon itself and it will do so very quickly.  This is the final hurrah for the star.  It goes bang, it explodes, it lights up – we’ll have incredible brightness for a brief period of time for a couple of weeks and then over the coming months it begins to fade and then eventually it will be very hard to see at all.”

What prompted this speculation?
Astrophysicists have noticed that Betelgeuse, the second-biggest star in the universe, is losing mass, indicating that a gravitational collapse is set to occur. "The star will literally collapse in upon itself and it will do so very quickly," says physicist Brad Carter, as quoted by News.com. Earthlings will have a "front-row seat" for the eventual explosion, says Alasdair Wilkins at IO9. Betelgeuse, he adds, is "one of the brightest and biggest stars in our galactic neighborhood — if you dropped it in our Solar System, it would extend all the way out to Jupiter, leaving Earth completely engulfed."

So when is this explosion going to happen?
While it's possible that Betelgeuse will explode in 2012, the event "may not occur for a million years," says William Lee Adams in Time. Other commentators are more openly dismissive of the 2012 prediction: The "two suns" hype is a lot of hot air, scoffs Ian O'Neill at Discover, and the theory of Betelgeuse's imminent explosion — propagated partly by believers of a coming, Mayan-predicted doomsday — is "complete garbage." First of all, "there is absolutely no indication that the star will explode in the next year or so," and besides, "even the most advanced telescopes and sophisticated computer models cannot predict an exploding star with that precision."

When it does happen, will it be bad for Earth?
No. Betelgeuse is too far away to harm our planet and if it did someday appear as a second sun, it would only shine a fraction as brightly as the one we're used to. Wilkins says that, although uninformed observers are warning of dangerous ramifications, "as with pretty much all doomsday speculation, you can just ignore it."
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