Considering the scale of time for stars, I always read it as the lifetime of humans on Earth. Not our individual lifetimes. Like, Betelgeuse is so close to supernova that at some point in humanity's time on Earth we'll witness it. Other stars are millions to billions of years away from death that there's no point in considering it.

There's a pre-print (ie, not peer reviewed yet) study that, if correct, shows that the best-fit model for Betelgeuse's brightness oscillations over the past 30 years is that Betelgeuse is near the end of its carbon burning cycle. (doesn't have anything to do with the abnormal dimming in 2020 or so) If this study is correct (if) Betelgeuse will go supernova within 10-100 years.

The study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.00287.pdf

youtube explanation (Dr Becky Smethurst) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QgLwpuDGhI&t=415s

Already, this has rebuttals: https://twitter.com/lacalaca85/status/1666501987435700225 (link to a thread by author) and the paper itself: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2515-5172/acdb7a. (Note: RNAAS is not peer-reviewed, but there is a strict editorial standard; the arXiv thing is because of some long standing drama between arXiv and RNAAS).

The objections are primarily that the original paper assumes that a 2000 day period is the fundamental period of Betelguese's pulsation modes, which gives a radius that is much larger than what is observed in multiple wavelength bands.

It's unfortunate that Dr. Becky did not mention this in her video (perhaps it was published after she finished the script; even though it was out a while before the video was). I feel like this is not the first time that reputable science youtubers have jumped the gun on discussing research (Anton Petrov did something similar recently)

> doesn't have anything to do with the abnormal dimming in ~~2020~~ 2019 The Great Dimming is explained by this paper as being constructive interference of the pulsation modes (you can see this in their Figure 4. I don't know why Dr. Becky said this, but it doesn't seem to be correct.