Dying Retired CIA Worker Has Nothing To Lose And Reveals Dark Secrets About Area 51 & Aliens

On a clear winter night, it’s difficult to miss Orion the Hunter, who holds his shield in one hand and stretches his other arm high into the sky. Betelgeuse, a bright red dot on Orion’s shoulder, has captivated sky gazers for thousands of years with its strange dimming. Aboriginal Australians may have even worked it into their oral histories.

Today, astronomers know that Betelgeuse varies in brightness because it’s a dying, red supergiant star with a diameter some 700 times larger than our Sun. The star will eventually explode as a supernova, providing humanity with a celestial show before vanishing from our night sky forever.

That eventual explosion explains why astronomers were so excited in 2019 when Betelgeuse began to dim dramatically. The brightness of the 11th brightest star decreased by two-and-a-half magnitude. Could Betelgeuse have reached the end of its life? While unlikely, the idea of a supernova appearing in Earth’s skies caught the public’s attention.

And now, thanks to new simulations, astronomers have a better idea of what humans will see when Betelgeuse explodes in the next 100,000 years.

With all the speculation about how a Betelgeuse supernova would appear from Earth, astronomer Andy Howell of the University of California, Santa Barbara, got tired of the back-of-the-envelope calculations. He entrusted the problem to Jared Goldberg and Evan Bauer, two UCSB graduate students, who created more precise simulations of the star’s final days.

The astronomers say there’s still uncertainty over how the supernova would play out, but they were able to augment their accuracy using observations taken during Supernova 1987A, the closest known star to explode in centuries.

The Earth’s life will be unaffected. But that isn’t to say it will go unnoticed. Goldberg and Bauer discovered that when Betelgeuse explodes, it will shine as bright as the half-Moon — nine times fainter than the full Moon — for more than three months.

"All this brightness would be concentrated into one point," Howell says. "So it would be this incredibly intense beacon in the sky that would cast shadows at night, and that you could see during the daytime. Everyone all over the world would be curious about it, because it would be unavoidable."

Humans would be able to see the supernova in the daytime sky for roughly a year, he says. And it would be visible at night with the naked eye for several years, as the supernova aftermath dims.

"By the time it fades completely, Orion will be missing its left shoulder," adds Sarafina Nance, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student who’s published several studies of Betelgeuse.

Observations of the red giant revealed that gas that is leaving the star is colder than astronomers thought it would be. Scientists aren’t sure how so much mass left the star, while not generating a lot of heat, they said in a 2016 study. Possible explanations include magnetic fields, or shockwaves, but more work will be needed to confirm the models. Astronomers are also doing comparison studies with another red supergiant star, Antares, to better understand the situation.

Meanwhile, scientists remain puzzled by Betelgeuse’s ultra-fast rotation, which is about 150 times faster than expected. This may have happened if the star swallowed a sun-mass star about 100,000 years ago, according to a 2016 study. Given Betelgeuse’s huge size — it’s 1,000 times wider than our sun, or 860 million miles (1.4 billion kilometers) across — it should be spinning much more slowly, astronomers suggest.

In 2017, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array Telescope (ALMA) took its first image of Betelgeuse’s surface (image below), which astronomers said was the highest-resolution image yet obtained of the star. Scientists have unambiguously confirmed the collision of a black hole and a neutron star for the first time: the fateful moment when two extreme objects collide in an event so massive that its ripples across the cosmos can still be discerned a billion years later.

Surprisingly, an international collaboration of thousands of scientists has now reported that this astronomical discovery has been made not once, but twice.

Researchers detail the detection of gravitational waves resulting from two separate and distinct neutron star-black hole mergers – each registered by astronomers just 10 days apart in January

2020 – in a new study confirming this world-first observation.

Scientists have observed dozens of mergers of pairs of black holes and several mergers of pairs

of neutron stars. But a collision between a black hole and a neutron star, although predicted by scientists, was not detected.

"It’s an awesome milestone for the nascent field of gravitational-wave astronomy," says astrophysicist Rory Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) at Monash University.

"Neutron stars merging with black holes are amongst the most extreme phenomena in the Universe. Observing these collisions opens up new avenues to learn about fundamental physics, as well as how stars are born, live, and die."The virtually simultaneous discovery of the two events – called GW200105 and GW200115 – speaks to the speed with which the field of gravitational wave science is evolving.

Researchers have now detected gravitational waves from dozens of events – in total, about 50 individual instances of black holes colliding with other black holes or neutron stars colliding with other neutron stars – in less than half a decade since the first confirmed discovery of gravitational waves.

Researchers have now detected gravitational waves from dozens of events – in total, about 50 individual instances of black holes colliding with other black holes or neutron stars colliding with other neutron stars – in less than half a decade since the first confirmed discovery of gravitational waves.

A’mixed’ collision representing the merger of a neutron star and a black hole – known as an NSBH binary – had never been confirmed before, despite scientists picking up signals that were potentially suggestive of such a neutron star-black hole collision in the past.

Now, however, the discovery is unambiguous.

The first event, GW200105, was detected on 5 January 2020, involving a black hole (with about nine times the mass of the Sun, or 8.9 solar masses) colliding with a 1.9-solar-mass neutron star.

This collision took place about 900 million years ago, even though we’ve only just detected the gravitational waves rippling out from the two objects merging.

GW200115, discovered on January 15, 2020, is even older, having formed from the merger of a 6-solar-mass black hole and a 1.5-solar-mass neutron star around 1 billion years ago.

"These collisions have shaken the Universe to its core and we’ve detected the ripples they have sent hurtling through the cosmos," says astrophysicist Susan Scott from Australian National University (ANU).

"Each collision isn’t just the coming together of two massive and dense objects. It’s really like Pac-Man, with a black hole swallowing its companion neutron star whole."These binary systems have been predicted to exist for decades, but have never been observed before. Now, thanks to the detection of gravitational waves from their collisions, we know that these pairs do exist, even though many questions still remain.

"We’ve now seen the first examples of black holes merging with neutron stars, so we know that they’re out there," says gravitational-wave astronomer Maya Fishbach from Northwestern University.

"But there’s still so much we don’t know about neutron stars and black holes – how small or big they can get, how fast they can spin, how they pair off into merger partners. With future gravitational wave data, we will have the statistics to answer these questions, and ultimately learn how the most extreme objects in our Universe are made."

The findings are reported in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.A ghostly "hand" reaching through the cosmos has just revealed new information about massive stars’ violent deaths.

The spectacular structure is the ejecta from a core-collapse supernova, which astronomers have been able to observe as it blasts into space at around 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) per second by taking images of it over a 14-year period.

At the very tips of the "fingers", the supernova remnant and blast wave – named MSH 15-52 – is punching into a cloud of gas called RCW 89, generating shocks and knots in the material, and causing the expanding supernova to decelerate.MSH 15-52 is 17,000 light-years away from Earth, and it appears to be one of the Milky Way’s newest supernova remnants. Light from the stellar explosion reached Earth approximately 1,700 years ago, as the progenitor star ran out of fuel to support fusion, exploding its outer material into space, and collapsing its core.

That collapsed core became a pulsar, a type of "dead" star with neutrons packed so densely that they take on some of the properties of an atomic nucleus, pulsing light from its poles as it rotated at high speeds.

The X-ray nebula of ejected stellar material expanding into space is also shaped by this rotation.

A new study analyzes changes in RCW 89 as the supernova remnant plunges into it, using images from 2004, 2008, and 2017-2018.

We can better understand the velocity of the shock wave and knots of ejected stellar material in MSH 15-52 by calculating the distance traveled by these features over time. This is illustrated in the image below.