Great tension in the starry sky: Supernova candidate Betelgeuse is getting brighter and brighter. Big Bang soon? Science is paying close attention — and Twitter, as might be expected, is growing rapidly.
He’s still twitching, but the end is near. Betelgeuse will die after a life that seems ridiculously short in the cosmic timeline. The star, the astronomical definition of a red supergiant, is a tiny baby in the night sky, between eight and ten million years old. He was born thus when the first human ancestors were already standing on a mat in our solar system on planet Earth, buried by sunlight that was already four and a half billion years old at the time. With fuel in the tank to glow for another five billion years.
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