What would FDev do if Betelgeuse goes "pop"?

I meant the fact if Betelgeuse doesn't get brighter in a few weeks. This is an important detail. now it's only two cycles overlapping. But they should end in a few weeks. If it doesn't get brighter then it isn't normal.
Ah okay, now I get it. Sorry for misreading you, I think your initial "Actually it is quite probable that it already happened" misled me. Can you give me your source on the cycle not ending speculation?
 
Well, according to the distance and the time light needs to arrive here it could go BOOM every moment if it didn't do already
I'm not sure if you read the context and the misunderstanding, but generally speaking 640 years is just a blink in the astronomical time. It is indeed possible that Betelgeuse has already gone supernova, but it is also possible that it won't go in a million years - which definitely puts the likelihood in a new scale considering our brief human lives.

It's also worth pointing out that the actual state of Betelgeuse right now is kinda irrelevant because information only travels at light speed.
 
This game ignores the speed of light in every possible way. Travel to a distant nebula, and it should expand as you approach it, because your view of the nebula is traveling forward in time by perhaps thousands of years. I don't blame FDev, as it would be insanely complicated to render an evolving Milky Way that corrects for time in both directions. Not only do you travel forward in time, but backwards in time as well. Travel 2000 LY away and look back towards Sol and you'll see where it was 2000 years ago, not where it currently is (IRL, not the game).

Timey-whimey!!!
Yeah, so even if they did swap it out for a neutron star and nebula, it'd be, what? How many years in game before it was visible from even the closest star to it? If you jumped into the system though, you'd land in a cloud of hot expanding gas and, assuming you didn't overheat immediately, be able to supercruise out of it. And then what? Blast yourself full-throttle until you get to 2001c, point the camera backwards and watch it explode in reverse?
 
Yeah, so even if they did swap it out for a neutron star and nebula, it'd be, what? How many years in game before it was visible from even the closest star to it? If you jumped into the system though, you'd land in a cloud of hot expanding gas and, assuming you didn't overheat immediately, be able to supercruise out of it. And then what? Blast yourself full-throttle until you get to 2001c, point the camera backwards and watch it explode in reverse?
YES YES AND MORE YES OMG YES
 
Ah okay, now I get it. Sorry for misreading you, I think your initial "Actually it is quite probable that it already happened" misled me. Can you give me your source on the cycle not ending speculation?

No problem 😄
I guess unless you are German my source will be useless to you as it was a German site.

Here it is: https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/ar...plosion-Wird-Beteigeuze-zum-zweiten-Mond.html

"
Im Falle von Beteigeuze gibt es noch einen weiteren Aspekt, der eine Explosion für die sehr nahe Zukunft fraglich erscheinen lässt. Die Helligkeit von Beteigeuze schwankt nämlich ohnehin immer wieder. Allerdings war er seit Beginn der Messungen noch nie so dunkel wie jetzt.
Doch auch dafür könnte es noch eine andere Erklärung geben. Der Astronom Edward Guinan von der Villanova University bei Philadelphia erklärte der US-Fachzeitschrift „National Geographic“, dass die Helligkeit von Beteigeuze nicht strikt periodisch schwanke, sonders es zwei Zyklen gäbe, die sich überlagern.
Aktuelle falle das Helligkeitsminimum dieser beiden Zyklen zusammen, sodass der Stern so dunkel erscheinen könne, wie seit Beginn der Messungen nicht. Die eine Periode beträgt immerhin 2070 Tage. Erst wenn der Stern in einigen Wochen nicht wieder heller wird, „dann ist alles möglich“. Damit meint Guinan offensichtlich auch eine Supernova-Explosion."

Could try to translate it later if you wish.
 
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Okis, LIGO just detected an unknown or unanticipated burst of gravitational waves somewhere deep in space
the twitter announcement from Dr. Jessie Christiansen locates the origin in the beteigeuze area
Might not be it though, the area is rather large.

Edit: Actually if you read mr Howell's twitter, it most probably wasn't Betelgeuze.
 
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This game ignores the speed of light in every possible way. Travel to a distant nebula, and it should expand as you approach it, because your view of the nebula is traveling forward in time by perhaps thousands of years. I don't blame FDev, as it would be insanely complicated to render an evolving Milky Way that corrects for time in both directions. Not only do you travel forward in time, but backwards in time as well. Travel 2000 LY away and look back towards Sol and you'll see where it was 2000 years ago, not where it currently is (IRL, not the game).

Timey-whimey!!!
That would make the galmap a lot more interesting. It would also add a ton of elements to finding systems and searching the night sky. If the ever get the means to make that happen they should. They could even use it as a model to test astronomical data by comparing supposed info with the real observations. It would actually be good for research as it's a complex comparative model to theory.

Right now I can find supernova's in any sky in the game by looking for a tiny dot with a huge brown/grey halo. Look at galmap and point to stars to find the direction and move that way until you find it and point to it. This would add lots of complexity to this. And a much deeper game. I wonder if it would be easier if the night sky and actual map was independently generated. Maybe it would make it easier to modify and make corrections later.
 
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I believe the commonly-quoted figure of 100,000 years comes from this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1406.3143

The figure mainly derives from fitting the star's observed properties to computed evolutionary models. The best fit indicates that Betelgeuse has farily recently started burning helium in a shell around the accumulating carbon-oxygen core, which is the event that triggers the onset of the red supergiant phase. That model further predicts that it will take about 100,000 years for sufficient mass to accumulate to trigger the onset of carbon burning. The supernova would follow a short time after that (how short isn't addressed in the paper, but IIRC on the order of centuries at most). The uncertainly stems from the inability to say precisely how recently helium shell burning began, but it sounds like cross-checking with alternate models mostly yielded larger numbers than 100,000 years, not shorter.

My take on the recent dimming: Betelgeuse experiences huge "star spots" caused by coherent convection cells - the largest noted in that paper took up nearly one-third of its visible surface and contributed over 20% of its total luminosity. It's certainly possible for an unusually dark spot to have formed on the side facing us, and it's hard to say how long such a thing could last. If it is a star spot, I'd expect confirmation in the coming weeks-to-months, as surely someone will be applying for time on a large interferometric instrument to try and resolve spatial features on the surface (Betelgeuse is one of the few stars with a large enough apparent size that this is possible).

When smart people guess, it's still just guessing even though they're smart. It's called speculation and conjecture and none of it is fact. almost everything we know about space outside of our solar system is pretty much theory isn't it? I mean, we can do the math and come to logical conclusions, but nothing can be proved right?

No, that's not how any of this works.
 
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