Stuff like this keeps me awake at night

[Bob]

May I pop up with another interesting fact?

Since the light from both the sun and betelgeuse is travelling at the speed of light (duh). Special relativity tells us that the progression of time, from the perspective of the individual photons of light, is slowed to zero. This means that from the point of view of the individual photons it has infact taken them no time at all to reach earth from being created, however long they seem to have taken from our point of view.

Interestingly enough, my planetary systems lecturer was telling me, only on Wednesday, about betelgeuse possibly going nova in our lifetimes.
By the way, if you consider the huge brightness in the optical wavelengths of the supernova and the fact that it'll be sat in a nice blackbody curve, you'll see that there will be a huge amount of E-M radiation at other wavelengths hitting us as well as the optical light. While this may not wipe out life on the planet you can be sure that your GPS won't be working for a while.

-Bob

edit: whoopsie, forgot the lounge' threading system and didn't put this in appropriate thread. Sorry.