Are we going to have a second Sun?

After the story of shifting Zodiac, we now have a new story from scientists that the earth is going to see a second sun! I have all respect for the scientists and I don’t mean to disregard them or ridicule them. In fact I subscribe to many science magazines and keenly read latest developments. But this particular information that has hit the headlines comes with a prediction – which if made by an astrologer would have invited severe censure. It gives a time period for the sighting of the second sun varying from as close as a year to millions of years!!

The celestial body under scrutiny for becoming a second sun is an astrologically important one which also happens to be an important entity in Vedic parlance thereby giving us a clear-cut idea of what possibly could happen to it and when.

This entity is none other than the celebrated God of the Trinity – Rudra! 

Known as Thiruvadhirai or Arudra, this star in the constellation of Orion is a red giant nearing its end days.

But when the end will come is a matter of speculation to the scientific community. Usually they used to say that it would happen in the next few millions of years.

Now perhaps hyped by the Mayan date, they have started thinking of its end as early as 2012 itself!!

If this star explodes as a super nova, it will look bright and seen in the day time too. At night the brightness it emanates will be equal to that of Moon.

Will this happen in the near future?

Or will such a star, regarded as an important deity (remember Arudhra darshanam in the month of margazhi) come to an end?

Whether Arudra’s life will end or not is not a question in our dharma.

But if a second sun is seen in the sky, the world will come to an end – according to sakuna sastra.

At least a worst catastrophe will occur on earth wiping most of its inhabitants.

An explosion making it look like a sun will scorch the earth or affect the earth in worst ways.

The world will anyway come to an end when Rudra stirs up according to the principles of the respective duties of the Trinities.

But if we search for the answer for whether such an end will come now, it is not so. Vedic knowledge has answers for when the world for living beings came into existence and when it will die out.

The four faced Brahma did not start his work without a pre-plan.

The time and space determinants of how long this creation will go on have been stipulated.

As such we are at present in the day- kalpa of Brahma when life is brimming on the earth. The total duration of this period is 4,32,00,00,000 years.

Of this, nearly half the period is over now as we are in the 28^th chathur yuga in the 7^th manvantra.

By this year we have covered 196, 08,53,111 years so far.

Until we cover the rest of the period of the kalpa, no great danger will come to earth.

But human life might end much before that.

In this backdrop Arudra stands for destruction.

As long as Arudra keeps going, creative inputs will be there.

For instance Arudra stands for rains.

The day the sun enters the star Arudra is noted in astrology and predictions are made for the ensuing rainy season.

This is recorded in our almanacs as Arudra- pravesam.

So as long as Vedic dharma exists in some way and as long as some follower of Sanathana dhrama lives, Arudra will not disappear.

Its end can happen only when there is complete anarchy and Vedic dharma is completely forgotten – like how they used to say that Vedas were stolen by asuras and hidden somewhere.

So I don’t foresee the end of Arudra in the near future.

Some more info on Arudra:-

Rohini, Mrigashira and Arudra stand for the Trinity in that order.

In this figure of Orion, the pink arrow mark shows Arudra (Betelgeuse).

The green arrow shows Mrigashira.

It is in the direction of Mrigashira, our galaxy and Universe is progressing. 

At present this constellation of Orion can be seen rising in the east after sun set. 

Arudra stands at one end of our galaxy. In the visible sky, on the other side is the other olden star, Jyeshta. It is as though these oldies are keeping a watch on us.

In this picture, the green arrow on top points to the location of Arudra. The green arrow at the bottom points to the location of Jyeshta.

The further progression of the Universe will be in the direction of Mrigashira.

But then, for the duration of another Kalpa there will not be any creation of life.

The Universe will anyway keep moving.

By the time the day-kalpa of Brahma begins, life will be manifest at that time in that part of the Sky where the Universe has progressed.

To give the precise date according to Vedic knowledge, the next sighting of life can be seen in the direction of Mrigashira at a distance of 6,28,08,53,111 years ahead.

-         jayasree

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From

http://www.dc-epaper.com/DC/DCC/2011/01/23/ArticleHtmls/23_01_2011_001_023.shtml?Mode=0

COSMIC PHENOMENON

Earth likely to get second Sun soon

London,

The Earth could soon have a second Sun when one of the brightest stars in the night sky explodes into a supernova. The cosmic phenomenon, which may happen as soon as this year and remain for at least a week or two, is expected to be the most stunning light show in the planet's history.

According to astronomers, the Earth will undoubtedly have a front row seat when the dying red super-giant star, called Betelgeuse, finally blows itself into oblivion. The explosion will be so bright that even though the star in the Orion constellation is 640 light years away, it will still turn night into day and appear like there are two suns in the sky for a few weeks, the Daily Mail reported.

The only real debate is over exactly when it will happen. In stellar terms, Betelgeuse is predicted to crash and burn in the very near future.

Brad Carter, of the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, claimed that the galactic blast could happen before 2012 -or any time over the next million years.
"This old star is running out of fuel in its centre," Dr Carter was quoted as saying. -PTI

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UPDATE on 4th Jan 2020

Even after nearly a decade the same speculation about Betelgeuse is continuing!  Read the article in Space.com

https://www.space.com/dimming-star-betelgeuse-red-giant-could-explode-supernova.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9155&utm_content=SDC_Newsletter+&utm_term=2988647&m_i=he3hO%2B9JjlGw_7SAIgqYbjgBFIgoLnPr9XYTl9IgGWTbh0CuZl46LHVFW6vhI0sp8gjAPxjur96bK9pt6UYuSBZdpkj7In8_MgsZCr3hhv

Will Bright Star Betelgeuse Finally Explode? A Look at the Dimming Red Giant in Orion's Shoulder

By Chelsea Gohd

One of the brightest stars in the sky has been dimming. But, while it might be signaling that it's ready to explode, it's probably just fading because of strange, stellar physics. 

Betelgeuse, a reddish star that's one of the brightest in the night sky, has been noticeably "fainting," or getting dimmer. The approximately 8.5 million-year-old star, which is part of the Orion constellation, has been one of the most recognizable stars in the sky because of its brightness and coloration. But this recent, dramatic fading has prompted scientists to suggest that the star might be entering a pre-supernova phase, dimming before it collapses and "dies" in a fiery supernova explosion. 

If the star does become a supernova, Betelgeuse would likely be as bright as, or even brighter than the moon for weeks or even more. 

At 642.5 light-years from Earth, it would be the closest supernova observed and recorded by humans (closer than the Crab Nebula, which is 6,523 light-years from Earth and is the result of a supernova reported to have taken place in A.D.1054). This also means that, if we see Betelgeuse explode tonight, the supernova really took place over 600 years ago, we're only seeing it now. 

"It'd be brilliant," the star would be so bright that it would make it difficult to see other stars near it," Edward Guinan, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University who reported the dimming in an Astronomer's Telegram, told Space.com. "It would be the brightest supernova ever observed in our galaxy."

But … will we really see Betelgeuse explode?

A massive, dimming star

It's not surprising that the extremely massive star (which is likely about 20 times the mass of the sun) has been dimming, because it's a variable star — meaning its brightness naturally shifts, something that scientists have observed for decades. The star has been classified a red supergiant star because of its size. However, with this recent dimming, the star's brightness "kept going down beyond the limits that we [scientists] ever saw it … it went outside of its usual parameter or comfort zone," Guinan said.

"It's dimming a lot more than we've seen," Sarafina Nance, an astronomy graduate student who studies Betelgeuse and stellar explosions at UC Berkeley, told Space.com. But, "does that dimming foretell an explosion? We know massive stars like Betelgeuse will explode as [a] supernova. The question is, when?"

"There really haven't been close observations of them [supernovae] before they go off," Guinan said. He explained that, while some think that there wouldn't be any visible, major changes in the star until just hours before it blows up, others think that it would start to dim about a year before exploding. "There's no true consensus." 

While it's possible that the star could explode anytime between now and 100,000 years from now, this dimming might not actually be a sign that it's about to blow, both Nance and Guinan said.

A false alarm?

While he acknowledges that it could explode soon and this dimming could be a sign that that explosion may happen relatively soon, "I believe it isn't going to blow up now," Guinan said. "I hope it does, but my bet is that it's not going to, it's gonna come back up [get brighter] again."

Nance admits that "we could absolutely be wrong," she said, referring to her theory that the dimming is not a sign that the star is about to explode. That said, "I do think that this is more indicative of really interesting physics that's going on with the star rather than an imminent explosion."

"If it does explode and we're wrong, awesome — I would love to be wrong, I would love to see that," Nance said.

While it would be pretty amazing to witness the ultrabright transformation of such an enormous and close star into a supernova, Guinan said, it seems more likely that this dimming does not indicate a pre-supernova phase and can be explained in another way.

According to Nance, while no one is exactly sure why this stellar fainting is happening, it could be caused by instabilities within Betelgeuse. She explained that different parts of stars can have different densities, and this density instability can cause energy to rise and fall within a star, moving energy from its inside to its outside. This, in turn, and can cause changes in brightness, cause the star to get bigger, to contract and much more. 

Nance added that this extreme dip in brightness could also be attributed to magnetic activity on the star, but it is difficult to model that activity through simulations, so they do not yet know if that is a definite factor. She even added that it's possible that matter ejected from the star is creating "a sort of dust fog" that's currently obscuring and "dimming" the star. 

The likely lack of a nearby explosion might make this star seem less interesting, but Nance thinks just the opposite. "I think that this is really interesting to watch and really interesting from a physics perspective of trying to better understand how massive stars experience periods of variability," she said.

You should still look up!

Now, while both Nance and Guinan think that it's most likely that Betelgeuse is just displaying a dimmer appearance because of some interesting stellar physics, they also agree that an explosion in our lifetime is still possible, and it's worth it to look up and look for the dimming star in the night sky. 

While "I don't think it's going to explode anytime soon," Nance said, "I'll keep my eye on it, just in case." 

"We don't know what's going to happen. There are absolutely limits to our models," she added. "I'm gonna look up at the night sky and check that it's still there every time I go outside."

Even if it is in a pre-explosion phase, it's exciting to watch the star now as it dims. It's "kind of neat to see astrophysics or astronomy and stellar evolution in action," Guinan said. These "changes are usually so slow that you can't observe them."

UPDATE on 11th Jan 2020 that Betelgeuse might have gobbled up its companion star, the signs of which are mistaken as that of a dying star

https://www.livescience.com/betelgeuse-may-have-been-two-stars.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2988647&m_i=iJBizTYYB0xwasvshMrkTUaCA5WR7S4tP02KEFHCZYuePtHFBiz8vzTgOUvkaaAy_D%2BYkjQYEwgp5OMV3WQjSkEhImVB9567w1prGXSiik

Bright Star Betelgeuse Might Be Harboring a Deep, Dark Secret

 Adam Mann - Live Science Contributor

HONOLULU —The giant red star Betelgeuse might be harboring a gruesome secret in its past. A new model posits that the prominent night-sky object was once two stars, until the larger star ate its smaller companion. And that could explain several of Betelgeuse's peculiar properties. 

Betelgeuse is a whopper of a star, with a diameter of 600 million miles (965 million kilometers), bigger than the orbit of Mars, according to the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. At a relatively close distance of 520 light-years from Earth, Betelgeuse is also one of the few stars whose surface features can be resolved with telescopes. 

By closely monitoring Betelgeuse's surface, different researchers have calculated that the star's rotational rate is somewhere between 11,000 and 33,000 mph (17,700 to 53,000 km/h), Manos Chatzopoulos, an astronomer at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, said during a session on Monday (Jan. 6) at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society here.

This is surprising because as a star ages and enters the red giant phase of its life, like Betelgeuse has, the star expands and its rotation typically slows down, much like an ice skater pushing out their arms to slow their spin, Chatzopoulos told Live Science. 

Betelgeuse is also a runaway star, meaning that the object is zipping along at a mind-boggling speed, in Betelgeuse's case, 67,000 mph (108,000 km/h) relative to background stars in the Milky Way, he added. 

"For such a famous star that everyone knows and loves, nobody has tried to explain the combination of these two things," Chatzopoulos said, referring to its odd rotation rate and speed. "So how do you put together these two facts?" 

A clue might come from where Betelgeuse is thought to originate, a star-dense region known as the Orion OB1a association. Along with colleagues, Chatzopoulos has suggested that gravitational interactions with the many stars in that region could have flung Betelgeuse away at high speed millions of years ago, explaining the star's hyper-velocity. 

Betelgeuse might have also had a smaller companion, the researchers posited, which got tossed out along with it. As Betelgeuse aged and expanded, it might have engulfed this partner, which would have stirred up Betelgeuse's outer layers "like stirring up coffee with a stick," Chatzopoulos said, and increased its rotation rate. 

He and his collaborators have run sophisticated stellar-evolution computer models incorporating all these ideas. The results that best fit Betelgeuse’s observed features suggested it was once two separate stars, one with 16 times the sun's mass and another with four times the sun's mass. The researchers are preparing to submit their research to The Astrophysical Journal. 

The researchers' models were also able to match the amount of nitrogen seen in Betelgeuse's atmosphere, which is unusually high. This is a potentially corroborating piece of evidence, because the stirring of a companion star might have dredged up nitrogen from Betelgeuse's center, Chatzopoulos said.

Earlier work by Chatzopoulos' former Ph.D. advisor offered the idea that Betelgeuse was formed as the merger of two stars. Chatzopoulos said that his new research expands on that prior idea and adds in specific simulations to account for the red giant star's rotation and speed. 

"I think it's interesting," said Andrea Dupree, a senior astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who was not involved in the work. Dupree and her colleagues previously proposed that Betelgeuse may have swallowed exoplanetary companions. But she said it would be useful to take a closer look at Betelgeuse's properties, some of which haven't been measured in as long as 30 years, before saying anything definitive. 

Betelgeuse has lately been in the news over the possibility that it could imminently burst as a spectacular supernova. Should Chatzopoulos' research provide the new explanation of Betelgeuse's birth, does it mean anything about the star's death? 

Chatzopoulos doesn't have an answer to that. But if his idea is correct, he said it could mean Betelgeuse was rejuvenated at some point in the past with fresh material from the companion that the star consumed. That could have led scientists to underestimate Betelgeuse's age, meaning it's not set to explode anytime soon. 

As an astronomer specializing in supernovas, he finds this perhaps a bit disappointing, he said. "All of us who study supernova wish it would happen in our lifetime," he said. 

Editor's Note: This story was updated to remove mention of spots on Betelgeuse's surface being used to measure rotational speed; not all measurements relied on these spots.