• 
• Tweet

• Tweet

Remember the part in Star Wars when Luke Skywalker walks off into the dual sunset? Well George Lucas may have been foreshadowing the very near future, as twin suns are in fact real, and they may just be coming to a town near you.

The first direct image of a star other than the Sun, made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Called Alpha Orionis, or Betelgeuse.

An Australian scientist, Dr. Brad Carter, says that Betelgeuse, which is something like 640 light years away and the second biggest star in the Orion constellation, appears to be losing mass at a fairly rapid rate. If that happens the star could go supernova, which would produce such a blindingly bright, that it would be visible in the earth’s sky as a second sun.

Betelgeuse is predicted to go kabloom and the impending super-nova may reach earth before 2012, and when it does, all of our wildest Star Wars dreams will come true. According to Dr. Carter, “this old star is running out of fuel in its centre, this fuel keeps Betelgeuse shining and supported. When this fuel runs out the star will literally collapse in upon itself and it will do so very quickly.”

When this happens a giant explosion will occur, tens of millions of times brighter than the sun. The bad news is, it could also happen in a million years. But who’s counting?

The important thing is, one day, night will become day for several weeks on Earth.

“This is the final hurrah for the star,” says Dr Carter. “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 over the coming months it begins to fade and then eventually it will be very hard to see at all.”

Far from being a sign of the apocalypse, according to Dr Carter the supernova will provide Earth with elements necessary for survival and continuity.

“When a star goes bang, the first we will observe of it is a rain of tiny particles called nuetrinos,” says Dr Carter.“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 particles that will come through our bodies and through the Earth with absolutely no harm whatsoever.”

Stars such as the supernova produce elements that are critical to life on Earth.

If you thought it was too hot last summer, you ain’t seen nothing yet, if the second sun comes to fruition, you may as well hit the fast forward button on global warming.

[Cheers newsfeed.time.com]