Earth may soon have a second sun The red supergiant star Betelgeuse is gett ing ready to go supernova, and when it does Earth will have a front-row seat. The exp losion will be so bright that Earth will briefly seem to have two suns in the sky. The star is located in the Or ion constellation, about 640 light-years away from Earth. It's o ne ofthe bright and biggest stars in our galactic neighborhood - if you dro pped it in our So lar System, it would extend all the way o ut to Jupiter, leaving Earth co mpletely engulfed. In stellar terms, it's predicted to explode in the very near future. Of course, the co nversi on from stellar to human terms is pretty extreme, as Betelgeuse is predicted to explode anytime in the next milli on years. But still, whether the explosion occurs in 2011 or 1002011 (g ive or take 640 years for t he light to reach Earth), it's going to make for one of the most unforgettable light shows in o ur planet's history. For a few weeks, t he supernova will be so bright that there will appear to be two stars in the sky, and night be will indistinguishable from day for much of that time. So don't count on getting a lot of sleep when Betelgeuse explodes, because the o nly sensible thing for the world to do will be to t hrow a weeks-long global supernova party. Physicist Brad Carter explains what Earth (and hopefully humanity) can look forward to: "This is the final hurrah for the star. It goes bang, it explodes, it lights up - we'll have incredible brightness for a brief period of time for a couple of weeks and then o ver the coming months it begins to fade and the n eventually it will be very hard to see at all." Although there'll be no mis sing the explosion, Carter points out that the vast majority of material shot out from the supernova will pass by Eart h completely unnoticed: "When a star goes bang, the first we will observe of it is a ra in of tiny particles called neutrinos. They will flood through the Earth and bizarrely enough, even though the supernova we see visually will light up the night sky, 99 per cent of the energy in the supernova is released in these
