Edward Guinan, an astrophysics and planetary science professor at Villanova, has been observing the star named Betelgeuse, a bright red supergiant, for 25 years.
He was the lead author on a Dec. 8 paper called "The Fainting of the Nearby Supergiant Betelgeuse." He said at the time that the star, which is located some 642 light years from Earth, had been declining in brightness sharply since October.
He sounded an alert to astronomers across the globe to take a closer look. They agreed with his assessment after a series of observations on telescopes equipped with sophisticated spectrometers, which are used for detecting the intensity of light.
"It would be a like a full moon over there, so it would just be a glow with a blue point source that would get brighter and brighter," Guinian said. "It takes about a week and a half to two weeks to get to a maximum brightness, and it would stay up that way for months and slowly fade away to nothing. In two or three years, you wouldn't actually see anything where Betelgeuse was. It would be a black hole."
At about 9 million years old, Betelgeuse is the most likely nearby supernova candidate, Guinan says. Stars of its size don't usually have lifespans past 10 million years. And while its time is nigh in a cosmological sense, Guinan says it probably won't explode for another 200,000 or 300,000 years.
And while it is relatively close, it is still far enough away that any dust or other material from the remains of the star wouldn't make it Earth, Guinan says. In the meantime, he says, astronomers are watching to see if Betelgeuse brightens again or dims further.
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