Re:Betelgeuse Remains Steadfast in the Infrared
by eric-hu on Thursday February 27, 2020 @03:37AM
(#22431660)
What's the relationship between mass, rotational velocity and what we can observe?
Re:Betelgeuse Remains Steadfast in the Infrared
by SiempreViernes on Thursday February 27, 2020 @06:23AM
(#22432345)
A very complicated one: basically the exact motion and temperature structure of the gas of the star greatly influences the spectrum.
So people run spectral synthesis codes of varying complexity, essentially simulating the entire star, and tweak the parameters to get good agreement between observed and simulated spectra.
Re:Betelgeuse Remains Steadfast in the Infrared
by Already__Taken on Thursday February 27, 2020 @03:25AM
(#22431618)
how can a star possibly be non rotating?
Even at the oldest it is likely to be, under the best possible conditions for the shortest possible lifespan, it will still likely spend another 150,000 years as a red supergiant before it collapses.
So I don’t believe your statement to be true. We could be wrong about the mass of Betelgeuse. We could be wrong about its age, its chemical composition, its rate of rotation, etc. We could be wrong about our theories of how red supergiants evolve. Any or all of those could lead us to incorrectly conclude that Betelgeuse won’t go supernova in our lifetime. But by our current cosmological understanding, it’s not that “it could go tomorrow or a hundred thousand years from now”. It’s that we’re pretty sure it won’t go for over a hundred thousand years. But if we’re wrong, it’s technically possible that it could happen tomorrow.