I don’t plan on dying (not much choice in the matter anyway, as a tentative believer in the quantum immortality clause of the many worlds theory), so I’m looking forward to it regardless. However, I would love to share the experience with my family, so if it goes off in the span of a typical lifetime from now, that’s even better.

According to google it’s 642 Light years away. As in, it takes 642 years until the light reaches us. So you probably won’t live to see it.

How bright will it be? Will we lose complete darkness at night? That would be a huge bummer.

Moths will be vexed.

That’s a super interesting question. The most recent supernova in our galaxy was Kepler’s Star in the early 1600s. However, that supernova was over 20,000 lightyears away. This one will be over 33 times closer and, assuming a similar luminosity of the explosion, 1100 times brighter (due to 1/r^(2))

Kepler’s Supernova had an apparent magnitude of about -2.5, so Betelgeuse’s supernova will be about -5.5 (According to wikipedia, it’s expected to be -12.4) For reference, the moon is -12.7, and the sun is -27. So it will be a bright boy.

I do not know if wildlife reacted much to the Kepler Supernova, but it is possible. You might be able to find records on the fact if you go digging.

I really don’t like how science communication is typically done, which is all of the math is stripped out, and all the ideas are told as if they were thought experiements, and it makes it easy to get the impression that what scientists do all day is just think abstractly about stuff.

So that’s why I linked the preprint directly. Just note that this is a preprint, and it hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, and, of course, not all of the work is shown in any article, even a scientific one.