Aye, my money is on Eta Carinae before Betelgeuse. There is a reason hypergiants are rare: their lifetimes are measured in millions of years instead of billions, and that sucker is over one hundred times the mass of the sun and puts out at least four million times the light. Good thing it's almost eight thousand light years away from us!
Dreams are free, but you get soaked on the connect time.
Nearby Supergiant stars (Score:5, Informative)
...are candidates
You get a lot of talk about how spectacular Eta Carinae would be if it went up. There's already been a Supernova "imposter" event... ..and here's some analysis of whether it's a danger. ...or has done so already
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae [wikipedia.org]
http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/answers/snrisks.txt [rit.edu]
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/246576/files/th-6805-93.ps.gz [cdsweb.cern.ch]
Re: (Score:1)
Aye, my money is on Eta Carinae before Betelgeuse. There is a reason hypergiants are rare: their lifetimes are measured in millions of years instead of billions, and that sucker is over one hundred times the mass of the sun and puts out at least four million times the light. Good thing it's almost eight thousand light years away from us!