What would FDev do if Betelgeuse goes "pop"?

Hmm, I think if it went supernova like... tomorrow.. the news would be rather big. I mean, that thing would be about as bright as a full moon in the night sky, no? You can't miss that, even if you don't care about space or astronomy.

For publicity's sake, it'd be a good idea to change it into a supernova remnant nebula + neutron star.

But actually, to be honest.. I couldn't care less. If I could see that supernova actually happen in the sky, that'd be worth so much more than anything FDev could add to the game. ;)
 
Betelgeuse is eminently replaceable in-game, partly because FD made an error in assigning the star it's mass.

The problem to be overcome, as always when proposing changes to the galaxy, is mass balance. Here is how we understand the Stellar Forge works:
  • The Galactic Seed creates a pattern of mass, from which stars are condensed.
  • Known real-world stars are then placed in their correct positions. The mass of those stars is subtracted from the galactic mass.
  • Any "leftover" mass not used up by the real-world stars is then used to generate procedurally-generated stars nearby.

So, the procedurally-generated galaxy depends on Betelgeuse being where it is, and having the mass it has. Delete or modify Betelgeuse, and you delete the procedurally-generated galaxy and replace it with one that is almost, but not quite, the same.

The only loophole that allows them to modify a star but kepp the rst of the galaxy as-is, is if the star being deleted is replaced with another one that has exactly the same mass. This is what they did with TRAPPIST-1, deleting a procedurally-generated star and replacing it with another star of exactly the same mass.

The good news is, FD made Betelgeuse way, way too lightweight. It's only got 0.2578 solar masses; the real Betelgeuse is about 400 times more massive than that. So it shouldn't be any trouble at all to delete Betelgeuse and replace it with a stellar remnant weighing 0.2578 solar masses.

The main "problem" will be the nebula, which an exploding Betelgeuse will certainly generate. Because, though they don't really look like it, nebulae in ED are "stars", from the Stellar Forge point of view. They have mass, which is subtracted from the background mass of the galaxy just like a star. I don't know if the Stellar Forge can handle the addition of a zero-mass object, and if it can't, then we can forget about adding a nebula around the Betelgeuse remnant.
 
It might already have happened!

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!!!
 
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!!!
Excellent point!

Of course the opposite could also be true. You fly thousands of LY to see something bright and shiny only to find a small black hole or ashes.
 
Betelgeuse is eminently replaceable in-game, partly because FD made an error in assigning the star it's mass.

The problem to be overcome, as always when proposing changes to the galaxy, is mass balance. Here is how we understand the Stellar Forge works:
  • The Galactic Seed creates a pattern of mass, from which stars are condensed.
  • Known real-world stars are then placed in their correct positions. The mass of those stars is subtracted from the galactic mass.
  • Any "leftover" mass not used up by the real-world stars is then used to generate procedurally-generated stars nearby.

So, the procedurally-generated galaxy depends on Betelgeuse being where it is, and having the mass it has. Delete or modify Betelgeuse, and you delete the procedurally-generated galaxy and replace it with one that is almost, but not quite, the same.

The only loophole that allows them to modify a star but kepp the rst of the galaxy as-is, is if the star being deleted is replaced with another one that has exactly the same mass. This is what they did with TRAPPIST-1, deleting a procedurally-generated star and replacing it with another star of exactly the same mass.

The good news is, FD made Betelgeuse way, way too lightweight. It's only got 0.2578 solar masses; the real Betelgeuse is about 400 times more massive than that. So it shouldn't be any trouble at all to delete Betelgeuse and replace it with a stellar remnant weighing 0.2578 solar masses.

The main "problem" will be the nebula, which an exploding Betelgeuse will certainly generate. Because, though they don't really look like it, nebulae in ED are "stars", from the Stellar Forge point of view. They have mass, which is subtracted from the background mass of the galaxy just like a star. I don't know if the Stellar Forge can handle the addition of a zero-mass object, and if it can't, then we can forget about adding a nebula around the Betelgeuse remnant.

Where do you have the information of the mass of the Galaxy from?
Never heard of it before.
And no. Betelgeuse has a mass of about 20 solar masses. You say it has a mass of 103,12 solar masses (0.2578 x 400 = 103.12). This is wrong, sorry.
 
Where do you have the information of the mass of the Galaxy from?
Never heard of it before.

It's explained in Dr Ross' Discovery Scanner interview:

Source: https://youtu.be/Vz3nhCykZNw


Particularly around time=19:22-21:37, where it talks about creating the galactic sectors and putting mass in them, and time=28:15-30:00, where it talks about using the mass assigned to the sectors to generate proc-genned star systems within the sectors.

In terms of subtracting the mass from known IRL stars first, we have to turn to places like this comment from David Braben back when TRAPPIST-1 was added to the game. Of particular interest is this line:

The way Stellar Forge works is to use ‘available mass’ from which to generate systems – and because of this unaccounted mass, Stellar Forge has created a system with a Brown Dwarf in very nearly the same place – 39 light years away – this is only a little smaller than an M8 – and it even has seven terrestrial worlds around it – Core Sys Sector XU-P A5-0.

In other words: the Stellar Forge assigned a certain amount of mass to the sub-sector where TRAPPIST-1 is located in-real-life. Much (but not all) of that mass was "used up" by the non-procedurally-generated stars inserted into the sub-sector, but there was enough "unused" mass left over to precipitate out some brown dwarf stars, one of which was (procedurally) placed in what was very nearly the correct location for TRAPPIST-1. Which made it real easy for FD to "Add TRAPPIST-1 to the galaxy", by sacrificing and over-writing the Core Sys Sector XU-P A5-0 system. The logical corollary is that if Core Sys Sector XU-P A5-0 had not been there, it would have been impossible to add TRAPPIST-1 (or they'd have had to pick one of the other brown dwarfs nearby to sacrifice).

You can verify that FD have done this, quite easily: do a galaxy map search for "Core Sys Sector XU-P A5-0", and it will centre the map on TRAPPIST-1. As far as the game is concerned, they are two names for one and the same system.

And no. Betelgeuse has a mass of about 20 solar masses. You say it has a mass of 103,12 solar masses (0.2578 x 400 = 103.12). This is wrong, sorry.

Yes, you're correct, sorry about that. I got the decimal place wrong. 😅 Should have been "40 times". The point remains: Betelgeuse is much, much lighter than it "should be", so there isn't a problem with substituting Betelgeuse for a much-smaller-than-Betelgeuse-sized stellar remnant.
 
Yes, you're correct, sorry about that. I got the decimal place wrong. 😅 Should have been "40 times". The point remains: Betelgeuse is much, much lighter than it "should be", so there isn't a problem with substituting Betelgeuse for a much-smaller-than-Betelgeuse-sized stellar remnant.

Maybe Frontier foresaw Betelgeuse exploding in a Supernova and set the mass lower to exchange it with a neutron star later on 😄
 
Hmm, I think if it went supernova like... tomorrow.. the news would be rather big. I mean, that thing would be about as bright as a full moon in the night sky, no? You can't miss that, even if you don't care about space or astronomy.

For publicity's sake, it'd be a good idea to change it into a supernova remnant nebula + neutron star.

But actually, to be honest.. I couldn't care less. If I could see that supernova actually happen in the sky, that'd be worth so much more than anything FDev could add to the game. ;)
If it happened tommorow im pretty sure we wouldnt see it in our lifetime. Isnt it like 500+ ly away?
 
Actually it is quite probable that it already happened. In this phase we see Betelgeuse now on Earth scientists predict it'll take about 1000 years maximum to explore into a Supernova.
What's your source on that? Considering the latest dimming and the interest it sparked, I've seen multiple astronomers saying that it might easily take another 100 000 - 1 000 000 years before Betelgeuse actually goes nova.

Business Insider said:
Astronomers think Betelgeuse's dimming is most likely just another short phase in the life of a giant star that's burning through the last dregs of its fuel.

"If we look at the past brightness of Betelgeuse, it has gone up and down," Larry Molnar, an astronomer at Calvin University, told Business Insider. "It could still be a million years before it explodes."

source
 
What's your source on that? Considering the latest dimming and the interest it sparked, I've seen multiple astronomers saying that it might easily take another 100 000 - 1 000 000 years before Betelgeuse actually goes nova.
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?
 
What's your source on that? Considering the latest dimming and the interest it sparked, I've seen multiple astronomers saying that it might easily take another 100 000 - 1 000 000 years before Betelgeuse actually goes nova.

I wasn't precise. I meant if Betelgeuse doesn't get brighter as it should get after the time the cycle would predict. In words: if Betelgeuse doesn't get brighter in a few weeks as it should following it's brightness cycle everything is possible but at least one can say the end is really near in astronomical words. So that scientists can say it should happen within a 1000 years.

And this is logical too. The darker Betelgeuse gets the colder it gets, meaning the pressure in it's core gets weaker and the gravitation will win causing the matter to get forced into the core and bringing the pressure to a maximum level resulting in a Supernova.

However that might be, we can't exactly know that. As Filthy says that are only predictions but based on science. We never actively watched a Supernova. We only saw it when it already happened. I guess there is only one event where we really knew and observed the previous star.
 
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So that scientists can say it should happen within a 1000 years.
nothing can be proved right?
I'm not so much interested about epistemological argument as I am reading a source that says that Betelgeuse should go supernova in 1000 years. There's a huge difference between stating that and stating that Betelgeuse might go supernova during the next 100 000 years which is the most common number I've seen quoted.

I wasn't precise.
"Earth scientists predict it'll take about 1000 years maximum to explore into a Supernova" is pretty precise as astronomical arguments go.
 
I'm not so much interested about epistemological argument as I am reading a source that says that Betelgeuse should go supernova in 1000 years. There's a huge difference between stating that and stating that Betelgeuse might go supernova during the next 100 000 years which is the most common number I've seen quoted.


"Earth scientists predict it'll take about 1000 years maximum to explore into a Supernova" is pretty precise as astronomical arguments go.

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.
 
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