While camping, I noticed that if you look long enough at almost any star, you start seeing some tiny, subtle colors in that star. Even crazier, they sometimes flicker between more colors. In my case orange, blue and something like cyan.
Besides constellations, what else could you observe regarding starts, with the naked eye?
Stars have color in outer space. Stars flicker because of the atmosphere.
Betelgeuse will be going supernova in the next few decades and I’ve been looking at the light fluctuations.
In reality, it’s probably already happened! And the light just hasn’t reached us yet
Pretty insane to think about that
550 Lj, but its only expected in 1,5mio Years
[15] R Neuhäuser, G Torres, M Mugrauer, D L Neuhäuser, J Chapman, D Luge, M Cosci: Colour evolution of Betelgeuse and Antares over two millennia, derived from historical records, as a new constraint on mass and age. In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Band 516, Nr. 1, 5. September 2022, ISSN 0035-8711, S. 693–719, doi:10.1093/mnras/stac1969
next few
decadesminutes to hundreds of millenia, probably.
FTFY
As far as we know it might already have gone nova and the light still need to reach us, or it will still take millenia to go boom
I do hope it’s soon though, that would be awesome, for months we’d have like a second moon in the sky.
It would be much more surprising if they didn’t have any colour. How would that even work?
Talking about stars and light, white is the opposite of a non-color. It’s all the colors all at once. Black is the only nob-color. Our sun isn’t actually white, it emits a broad spectrum of light which appears white to our eyes, it actually emits more green to blue-green light than anything else. Look-up the sun’s spectrum or the main sequence of stars and you’ll see what I mean.
How stoned were you when you posted this?
If you are out somewhere dark enough and look up long enough, you usually see several shooting stars.
Also interesting: some cultures recognize images in nebulae and dark spots in the sky instead of or alongside constellations (eg. Australian indigenous Emu in the Sky)
I just read this article about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Aboriginal_astronomy
Thanks!
