The Seven Sisters

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There were seven sisters. A few thousand years ago, one died. Man recorded the loss. But another sister is about to die. Scientist are recording the event. It is happening slowly, element by element. Moving from hydrogen at the bottom higher and higher and higher until it finally explodes.

The sister that is about to die is close -- too close to our home, our planet, the place we live.

Do you know what to do when it dies. Where will you go? How will you hide? Can you survive? The secret is underground.

Pieces of the planet will break apart and move near the speed of light and strike our planet, our home. They will drill down through our atmosphere, down to ground level. Keep your eye on the sister that is about to die.

The main time of threat will occur during the very beginning of the explosion. This is because of the speed, near light speed.

Now I remember the name of this star. It is called Beetlejuice. It is only 400 to 500 light years away from our home. That is extremely close to Earth for an event of this type. It lies near the edge of an extinction level event, in my humble opinion.



Do you know what to do when Betelgeuse explodes?

I'm not sure why you're referencing the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters), which is unrelated to either of the videos or the events they describe.

The first is about a star in the Corona Borealis constellation (T Coronae Borealis - nicknamed the Blaze Star, a binary star and a recurrent nova about 3,000 light-years away), with the next outburst estimated to be in September 2024.

The second refers broadly to a number of stars expected to go supernova in the next 1,000 years and eventually describes the same expected event, and date, as the first video.

But that event does not involve Betelgeuse, a red supergiant in the constellation of Orion - top left as viewed from Earth and ~640 light years away. That's not expected to go supernova for ~100,000 years.

When T Coronae Borealis has another outburst it's estimated that it will be as bright as the North Star (Polaris) and should remain visible for a few days.
As a recurrent nova (~80 years) it's been observed before, with the earliest known description from 1217 and the last in 1946.

But it's a star system and not a planet, so there will be no pieces of it hurtling destructively over 3,000 light-years toward Earth.
Just as before.

Now when Betelgeuse goes supernova, assuming there's anyone left here to observe it, I'd say the best course of action would be to dig out the deckchairs (or their future equivalent) and enjoy the show.

According to Wikipedia:

For various reasons, its distance has been quite difficult to measure; current best estimates are of the order of 400–600 light-years from the Sun – a comparatively wide uncertainty for a relatively nearby star. With an age of less than 10 million years, Betelgeuse has evolved rapidly because of its large mass, and is expected to end its evolution with a supernova explosion, most likely within 100,000 years.

Starting in October 2019, Betelgeuse began to dim noticeably, and by mid-February 2020 its brightness had dropped by a factor of approximately 3, from magnitude 0.5 to 1.7. It then returned to a more normal brightness range, reaching a peak of 0.0 visual and 0.1 V-band magnitude in April 2023. A study using the Hubble Space Telescope suggests that occluding dust was created by a surface mass ejection; this material was cast millions of miles from the star, and then cooled to form the dust that caused the dimming.

Betelgeuse and its red coloration have been noted since antiquity; the classical astronomer Ptolemy described its color as ὑπόκιρρος (hypókirrhos = more or less orange-tawny), a term later described by a translator of Ulugh Beg's Zij-i Sultani as rubedo, Latin for "ruddiness". In the 19th century, before modern systems of stellar classification, Angelo Secchi included Betelgeuse as one of the prototypes for his Class III (orange to red) stars. Three centuries before Ptolemy, in contrast, Chinese astronomers observed Betelgeuse as yellow; Such an observation, if accurate, could suggest the star was in a yellow supergiant phase around this time, a credible possibility, given current research into these stars' complex circumstellar environment.

As the star ages and gets closer to exploding into a supernova event, the color of the star will evolve as the core materials moves up through the different elements until it finally explodes. This is a massive star with a short lifespan and it is very close to Earth.

There's no denying that Betelgeuse is close, astronomically speaking, at ~500 light years, and that it will eventually go supernova - but as an event predicted some 100,000 years in the future, asking if we know what to do when it does seems a little premature.

But Betelgeuse going supernova will not affect Earth; ~500 light years away is still much too distant for it to cause damage here, where it would appear as a very, very bright star lasting some months and visible during the day, before becoming either a neutron star or black hole depending on how much material is left.

Maybe expressing that distance in more Earthly units will give a better perspective - it's approximately 4.73e¹⁵ kilometres away, roughly 5 quadrillion kilometers.

The event itself is estimated to release as much energy in a fraction of a second as our Sun generates in its entire lifetime.

Nevertheless, interesting though it is, speculation about Betelgeuse is unrelated to the Pleiades or the more predictable and imminent T Coronae Borealis event - apparently the subject of your opening posts or at least the start, I think?

When Betelgeuse explodes in a supernova event, much of the mass of the star is not exploded in all directions like a bomb, but rather much of the material is sent along the stars spin axis. There is a very small thin line-of-fire. Much of space is primarily a vacuum. If Earth is along the spin axis, Earth and our solar system can be decimated. The initial blast moves the material near the speed of light. There is very little warning.