betelgeuse

My favorite fact about Betelgeuse is that light takes 1.5 hours to travel the distance of its diameter.

The wikipedia article on near-Earth supernovae [1] suggests that Betelgeuse will be pretty safe because of its distance.

This sort of reminds me of the scene in Betelgeuse where the candy bar was dangled and drew the fly in.

You are maybe thinking of the Great Collapsing Hrung Disaster that wiped out all the old Praxibetel communities on Betelgeuse Seven.

All that said, Betelgeuse isn’t expected to explode for another 100,000 years or so.

The chances of light from Betelgeuse igniting a fire are very much zero.

My personal favorite is Eta Carinae which could be 20 times the size of Betelgeuse and may be big enough to be a hypernova.

If there is a bronze age civilization in the vicinity of betelgeuse, how would we tell?

There's a decent chance of seeing a supernova visible with the naked eye in your lifetime, but a pretty small chance of one as bright as betelgeuse.

But I don't think Betelgeuse would be dangerous in this way.

I 'learned' how earth is already doomed because Betelgeuse went supernova, and that there are deep shafts below the pyramid of Gizeh that only an alien race could have dug.

You cannot spend arbitrary time traveling to and fro across the galaxy to talk to friends, the molten iron geyser you wanted to see at Betelgeuse will no longer be running by the time you get there.

The brightness of Betelgeuse’s supernova is about the same as the quarter moon." This will last maybe a couple of weeks, but we don't expect it for 100K years.

From the Wikipedia entry on Betelgeuse: "Some theorists[who?] have speculated that this behavior is expected for a star at the beginning of the gravitational collapse at the end of its life.[citation needed] The mass of Betelgeuse puts it in range to become a neutron star or possibly a black hole." So this might be what is happening.

Now as that spatial component approaches c, it becomes more and more difficult to hang a left at Betelgeuse.

While on the subject of words with Arabic etymological roots, my personal favourite is Betelgeuse.

That's Betelgeuse, the red giant star that could go supernova one day.