Neil deGrasse Tyson
**Betelgeuse is Dimming**
No need to panic, but the red supergiant star Betelgeuse (yes there is a star with that name), one of the brightest in the nighttime sky, marking the left armpit of the constellation Orion, is mysteriously dimming, having lost 60% of its brightness across the past six months -- dropping from the 6th to the 21st brightest star in the nighttime sky.
The star is so large, if you swapped it with the Sun, it would engulf the orbit of Mars and extend all the way to the asteroid belt. And at 700 light years, it's the closest star to the Sun that will end its life in a Supernova explosion.
Betelgeuse was born about 10 million years ago — long after Earth's big dinosaurs roamed the land. But the star is now near death. Stellar evolution models tell us that it will likely explode as a Supernova sometime within the next 100,000 years.
If it exploded, the flash would be visible in the daytime, and rival the brightness of the Moon for weeks.
Betelgeuse is the star's common name — Arabic for "Armpit of the Great One". Its catalog name is Alpha Orionis. Two thirds of all stars in the night sky with names have Arabic names. An homage to their "stellar" navigational skills 1000 years ago, during the Golden Age of Islam.
Indeed, Betelgeuse may have already exploded — now a ghost, a "dead star walking" across the Galaxy — with the light-speed signal of its demise not yet arrived here on Earth.
And just to be clear, there is no cause to blame anything that happens to the star Betelgeuse on Donald J. Trump
With stellar death comes cosmic rebirth as the spewed guts enrich nearby clouds with elements of life itself — carbon nitrogen oxygen — boosting chances that the next generation of star systems borne of these clouds will spawn planets such as Earth that cradle life such as ours.
