I think we can relax…

Forums General Discussion Betelgeuse I think we can relax…

#581826
Dominic Ford
Keymaster

As regards wavelengths causing problems, I think that’s very unlikely.

It’ll produce plenty of UV and X-ray photons, but assuming they come out uniformly in all directions, it wouldn’t have the power to do anything serious from a distance of 700 lyr. If it beamed them in a jet in our direction, that might be a different story. Luckily there’s strong evidence the rotational pole is inclined at an angle of about 20 degrees to our line of sight, and any jets would be directed out of the poles. So I think we can sleep easy.

But as Xilman says, the world’s professional astronomers may struggle to find high-resolution spectrographs that can deal with something that bright.