Star Betelgeuse's Spectacular Supernova Will Be Visible With the Naked Eye

BY JESS THOMSON ON 6/16/23 AT 10:13 AM EDT


The Earth might soon be in for a spectacular show in both the nighttime and the day, as our stellar neighbor Betelgeuse approaches its end of days.

Betelgeuse, a star around 650 light years away from Earth, has been getting increasingly bright, hitting 142 percent of its usual luminosity at the end of May, leading scientists to suggest it might be fixing to go supernova—a huge explosion that occurs at the end of a star's life.

If this dramatic star-death occurs during our lifetimes, it is expected to appear as a huge bright patch in the sky during both the day and night, around the same brightness as the full moon at its peak.
Stock image of a supernova. Betelgeuse, a huge star 650 light years away, may soon explode into a supernova that would be visible during the day.ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS
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Betelgeuse is a red supergiant around 15 to 20 times more massive than the sun, and around 1,400 times the size, located in the constellation of Orion.

"[After the supernova] Betelgeuse would then fade over the next several months but remain visible in the daytime for six to 12 months. At night, you should be able to see it with the naked eye for another one or two years. But after that, we would never see it again—Orion would forever lose its red sparkle," Albert Zijlstra, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester, wrote in an article for the Conversation.

Supernovas visible during the daytime have only happened a few times in the last millennium, he explains, so Betelgeuse's proximity to us would be an incredibly rare sight in the case of its supernova.

The last supernova that was visible without a telescope was SN 1987A, in our neighboring galaxy of the Large Magellanic Cloud, which was briefly visible in the night sky in 1987, and the last supernova to be visible in our galaxy was SN 1604, or Kepler's Supernova, which occurred in the year 1604 and was bright enough to be seen during the day.
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Betelgeuse is known to be towards the end of its life and was previously expected to go supernova in the next few hundred thousand years. Betelgeuse is now brighter than we have ever seen it, having been promoted from the 10th brightest star in the sky to the seventh, leading some scientists to predict that the star might explode much sooner than we thought.