Betelgeuse, causing indirect impacts to the solar system

[Subrectre]

With just a nudge, Betelgeuse can commit the comet to come.
​

Something I've never actually seen or heard considered when it comes to cataclysmic earth impacts, is Betelgeuse and its eventual supernova.

Not directly impacting the earth, of course. It’s energy burst wont even compare to daily bombardment of the sun’s solar winds, that are being blocked by our magnetic field. We see this every night near either polar region as an aurora.

But, consider the last supernova visible to earth. What is commonly known as the crab nebula, is a kind of nebula called a supernova remnant. So, a thousand years ago it was a common star going supernova. Seen and recorded, the light of the crab stars supernova was seen as a bright star visible by daylight and having lasted for several days. The crab nebula is 650ly (light years) from earth.
Betelgeuse is a red supergiant.. over ten times closer to earth than the crab nebula, It is 64ly away. And hundreds of thousands of times larger than our sun.

The problem for earth won’t be caused by a direct effect of the blast. But, the sustained energy shockwave caused by Betelgeuse would be just enough to give a significant nudge to a small portion of the objects our Oort cloud.

At one light year away, totally uninfluenced by the solar winds of our sun, our Oort cloud is comprised nickel/iron and water ice, Estimated at million km wide objects at a distance that forms a bubble. Most of its density follows the same elliptical path our planets. A few of these objects have already been set into motion and travel through the solar system. We know as comets. Most are drifting in and out of our inner solar system like clockwork predictable orbits on harmless paths. Yet, some Oort cloud objects, appear randomly with no known cause, and on planetary collision courses. Shoemaker Levi 9, was such an object. In the 90s it created an impact on Jupiter so great, that one of the nine comets impact created a fireball large enough to engulf to totally the earth. Nasa recorded and made live video of this event.

The Betelgeuse supernova energy blastwave will be by comparison to the crab nebula event, seen in the northern hemisphere as a second smaller sun that will continue to glow for 40+ hours. It will be the brighter than every star in our galaxy for more than a day. From such a blast of energy, even at 64 light years away it will cause a slight disruption to objects between it the Oort cloud and our sun. Just a slight nudge inbound, to a fraction of the sky, by the sustained blast, to objects beyond our suns influence will cause them to drift, starting with just a few kph inbound, the sun’s gravity and time will build the momentum to do the rest. This is how all comets begin, with a small disruption, gravity and a lot of time.


After the Betelgeuse supernova some 60-80 years later, the solar system is going to be under fire … maybe some will read the warnings and be prepared to and practical enough to live in space.

When a sun produces iron, it's the end. Iron being a black metal the color absorbs the infrared radiation. That's why you see dark red expanding and contracting. Iron can only take so much. Betelgeuse is coming sooner than later.

​

 

[billslugg]

It won't take 80 years for a nudged object in the Oort Cloud to reach the inner Solar System, it will take many thousands of years. The Oort Cloud lies 2,000 to 200,000 AU away. A recent visitor from the Oort Cloud was C/2013 A1 Siding Spring. It came in from 52,000 AU and took "several million years" to get here.

C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) - Wikipedia

 

[Atlan0001]

It won't tske 80 years for a nudged object in the Oort Cloud to reach the inner Solar System, it will take many thousands of years. The Oort Cloud lies 2,000 to 200,000 AU away. A recent visitor from the Oort Cloud was C/2013 A1 Siding Spring. It came in from 52,000 AU and took "several million years" to get here.

C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) - Wikipedia

Bill, it spiraled in. How many spirals and how many AUs (how much AU) would that spiraling have represented beyond a given radius? You gave radiuses to the Oort cloud. Otherwise, concerning 80 years to many thousands, to several million years, agreed for any object not self-powering continuously (not continuously accelerative) which can cut corners . . . which could do away with spiral and spiraling curvatures. Also shrinking distances of 2,000 to 200,000AU -- and even much greater distances than those -- greatly, just as we have shrunk distances point A to point B greatly upon our planet over the last several thousand years. Distances are relative, not absolute, don't you think? Even physicist Michio Kaku wrote of seeing that problem of relativity for what it is and possibly solving it like we've already been busy solving it for so long.

 

[billslugg]

This comet did not "spiral in". There is no such thing at these scales.
There is no other shape of a two body orbit in free space than an ellipse. That's all this is.
Distances as measured by observers in different inertial frames are corrected by Lorentz factor. It applies only to the line of sight velocity.

 

[Atlan0001]

Certainly there are such things at large scales, even at the largest scales, such as "spiral galaxies."

Gravity, to some degree. is a game of catch and toss. It catches an incoming ball (whatever) swings it around and tosses it back out, only to catch it again, bringing it back in to swing it around again and toss it back out, it, the object, spiraling in an elliptic route, and being tossed back out again into an elliptical. Even bigger mass objects, such as the Earth and Jupiter spiral somewhat, though to a very little, very tiny, very limited, degree of in and out. The whole solar system does some spiraling in its movement around the Milky Way spiral galaxy, it, Sol, nor its components ever dealing in gravitational elliptic without gravitational spiral in and out.

 

[Helio]

It won't tske 80 years for a nudged object in the Oort Cloud to reach the inner Solar System, it will take many thousands of years. The Oort Cloud lies 2,000 to 200,000 AU away. A recent visitor from the Oort Cloud was C/2013 A1 Siding Spring. It came in from 52,000 AU and took "several million years" to get here.

C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) - Wikipedia

I stumbled across an article years ago that greatly helped my attempt to determine the free-fall time of objects in our solar system. We can use Kepler's law -- a^3 = p^2. Simply set the semi-major axis (a) value to a/2 if the orbit is circular, or, in this case, a/2 for an object floating in the Oort.

So for an object at 2,000 AU with e=1, fall time is 31,623 yrs. At 5,000 AU, it's 62,500.0 years .

For a 52k AU distance (a = 26,000 AU), then fall time is 2.1 million years.

To verify this, use 2014 UN271 ephemerides since it has an e=0.9987, a=8,385 AU. This is a monster of a comet, BTW, from the Oort.

This does assume an initial velocity (at aphelion) of 0 mph.

 

[billslugg]

Certainly there are such things at large scales, even at the largest scales, such as "spiral galaxies."

Yes, there are spiral shapes. But these stars are not falling to the center. Their velocity vector is normal to a line drawn to the center. They are not "spiraling in".

 

[Atlan0001]

Yes, there are spiral shapes. But these stars are not falling to the center. Their velocity vector is normal to a line drawn to the center. They are not "spiraling in".

You are not reading me very well. Spiral shape is spiraling, in and out! Hugely or just a tiny wobbling, a tiny fluctuation in an orbit, the object mass being pulled in and thrown out a tiny, tiny, bit, or hugely big time! It's all gravitational spiraling. not a perfect circle, not a perfect orbit, like not a straight line, anywhere . . . except as a self-powering traveler, a self-accelerating traveler, makes one a little straighter, or a lot straighter by leading the curve and cutting, thus tunneling ((0-point-portal) tunneling), through it (warping it by going elsewhere and back to it . . . aka, in a different but similar dimensionality, balloon-bubble-warping space-time). One example on Earth is flying the curve of the great northern route San Franciso to Tokyo, a curve in one view yet the straightest line and shortest space-time between.

Continuing on this tangent, the shortest route, the straightest line, between the inner planets and outer planets and comet clouds may turn out to be a perpendicular line of travel away from the more or less equatorial plane of the solar system curving out of the equatorial toward the quickest way to interstellar space then curving back into the system in the region of the outer system. Just a thought. Just a possibility. Just possible systemic geometry.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Atlan0101, you need to learn more about gravitational orbit mechanics to have a logical conversation here. Orbiting things "spiral" due to various sorts of energy loss, which is not much of a factor for things in the Oort cloud heading toward the inner solar system until they get close enough to the Sun to evaporate on their sunward side. To get Oort objects to come close to the Sun, what you need to talk about is changes in elliptical orbital parameters due to short-term influences by your postulated shock wave, or for that matter, close misses by other objects.

What could really cause objects in the Oort Cloud to suddently change their orbits and head for the inner solar system en-mass would be some massive object flying by our solar system. And, that already appears to have happened about 70,000 years ago. See Sholz's Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz's_Star . Depending on how close it approached various objects in the Oort Cloud, it could make much greater effects on their orbits than what you are postulating for a shock wave from Betelgeuse's anticipated supernova. And, that was long enough ago that those perturbed object could be getting here soon, now.

There are no guarantees that Earth won't be wiped clean of all life by some astronomical event. But, the probabilities don't seem all that high for the near future.

 

[Atlan0001]

Atlan0101, you need to learn more about gravitational orbit mechanics to have a logical conversation here. Orbiting things "spiral" due to various sorts of energy loss, which is not much of a factor for things in the Oort cloud heading toward the inner solar system until they get close enough to the Sun to evaporate on their sunward side. To get Oort objects to come close to the Sun, what you need to talk about is changes in elliptical orbital parameters due to short-term influences by your postulated shock wave, or for that matter, close misses by other objects.

What could really cause objects in the Oort Cloud to suddently change their orbits and head for the inner solar system en-mass would be some massive object flying by our solar system. And, that already appears to have happened about 70,000 years ago. See Sholz's Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz's_Star . Depending on how close it approached various objects in the Oort Cloud, it could make much greater effects on their orbits than what you are postulating for a shock wave from Betelgeuse's anticipated supernova. And, that was long enough ago that those perturbed object could be getting here soon, now.

There are no guarantees that Earth won't be wiped clean of all life by some astronomical event. But, the probabilities don't seem all that high for the near future.

I know what an "orbit" is. And I can visualize the shift, the shifting, going on in one orbital system's mass and gravity orbiting around, orbiting through, the gravitational field of yet another orbiting system it belongs to that is orbiting around, orbiting through, the gravitational field of yet a third orbiting system that both belong to, looks like. I wasn't interested in individual shocks but built-in continuing gravitational pull and push effects that would change, or begin and continue to mitigate, the effect of any [one-time] shock event, shortly, and over ever lengthening times, spirals . . . and spiraling ever bumping your perfect rings of "orbital mechanics" you try to tell me exist (no spirals, no spiraling, in and out, as ever continuing 'adjustments' to "orbital mechanics").

 

[billslugg]

Yes, there is no such thing as a spiral orbit drawing objects towards the center in our Solar System. I studied orbital mechanics at the college level. One thing they drummed into us was that all 2-body orbits in free space are ellipses. To make a spiral there must be some way of steadily removing energy from the orbiting object. Two Black Holes in close proximity can do this via emission of gravitational waves. But in the Solar System or in a galaxy there is no such mechanism.

 

[Helio]

What could really cause objects in the Oort Cloud to suddently change their orbits and head for the inner solar system en-mass would be some massive object flying by our solar system. And, that already appears to have happened about 70,000 years ago. See Sholz's Star https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz's_Star . Depending on how close it approached various objects in the Oort Cloud, it could make much greater effects on their orbits than what you are postulating for a shock wave from Betelgeuse's anticipated supernova. And, that was long enough ago that those perturbed object could be getting here soon, now.

As mentioned in post #6, there is a neat trick in calculating free-fall time. What is missing in using Kepler's law is a possible initial velocity. Assuming we use a circular orbital speed, for lack of a better guess, and make this tangent vector into a radial vector, then deduct this speed from the net fall time....

Crunch.... 7,000 AU, conveniently, gives us ~ 70,000 years of fall time. This may have been too close to the Sun for the perturbation necessary to send it our way. At a better distance, say 50,000 AU, the fall time using this method gets us to 1.3 M years. Was there any close encounter a million or so years ago? Perhaps.

 

[Atlan0001]

All objects in the solar system are drawn toward the center. All objects in the galaxy are drawn toward the center. All, or most, of them have some throw to them, though. Or are under the gravitational influence of some dark matter, some 'dark', offsetting the draw to center to whatever degree. Even the draw toward the center itself is ultimately a draw toward the 'dark' or so-called 'black' hole.

The Earth's spin cycle, I read a long time ago, was once 14 hours. It is now 24 hours. It will one day be 25 hours, then one day be....

No sense in continuing to argue with you, though. I know what you were saying. You have no sense of what I was trying to say, an alternative picture I'm drawing. I will leave it lay.
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The tree is in the forest. The forest is in the tree. The one is drawn to the other. The one is repelled by the other. One side of the coin 'unity'. One side of the coin 'division'. Still one coin . . . and still many coins. From the many, one. From the one, many.

 

[billslugg]

In fact, the Earth is spiraling away from the Sun, although at a very slow rate. This due to tidal effects in the Sun and the pressure of sunlight. This pressure amounts to 31 trillion square meters of Earth cross sectional area times 1380 watts per square meter divided by the speed of light - result is 146 million Newtons, about1.4 million kilograms.

The Moon is also spiraling away from the Earth due to the tidal bulge on Earth, made by the Moon, being forced eastward by the Earth's rotation, pulling the Moon ahead in its orbit.

Thre reason I cannot understand what you are saying is because it does not make any sense. So, at this point, I agree, your best option is to stand down and think things over.

 

[Unclear Engineer]

Helio, The passage of a massive object through the Oort Cloud does not necessarily cause an affected Oort object to just "free fall" into the inner solar system. Think of it as an elastic collision. From a distance, it looks the same as a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball, although up close it is different because the gravitiational forces in such a collision are attractive instead of repulsive. But, the net effect looks like an elastic collision in either case. Anyway, a massive object could gravitationally add a velocity radial to the Sun's position that is quite large, depending on the velocity (speed and angle) of the massive body relative to the Sun.

Considering that we call it the Oort Cloud, I would expect a lot of different Oort bodies to get a lot of different speed and direction changes. This surely must have happened multiple times aleady in the 4.6+ billion years that there has been an Oort Cloud.

 

[Atlan0001]

In fact, the Earth is spiraling away from the Sun, although at a very slow rate. This due to tidal effects in the Sun and the pressure of sunlight. This pressure amounts to 31 trillion square meters of Earth cross sectional area times 1380 watts per square meter divided by the speed of light - result is 146 million Newtons, about1.4 million kilograms.

The Moon is also spiraling away from the Earth due to the tidal bulge on Earth, made by the Moon, being forced eastward by the Earth's rotation, pulling the Moon ahead in its orbit.

Thre reason I cannot understand what you are saying is because it does not make any sense. So, at this point, I agree, your best option is to stand down and think things over.

I stand down because you are not thinking things over, and I have no wish to continue an argument I see can have no end but deepening conflict. We don't even think alike (in the same world, verse, dimensionality).

 

[billslugg]

Atlan0101 - Your terms are acceptable.

 

[COLGeek]

This thread has run its course. Thank you to all who contributed.