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REPORT ABUSIVE REPLY
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Message Subject
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Light of the World. — Be the Light.
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Poster Handle
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R!€k¥ M |
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Post Content
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The historical evidence: Betelgeuse in transition, and an unchanging Antares
A key marker of the transition across the Hertzsprung gap is a change in color toward the reddish end of the spectrum. As such, historical descriptions of Betelgeuse or Antares denoting anything other than red would hint at a recent transition.
Digging into a variety of historical records, they uncovered several early descriptions of bright supergiants like Betelgeuse and Antares. One of the key sources for Betelgeuse was De Astronomica, a Roman text attributed to Gaius Julius Hyginus (64 BC-AD 17), the keeper of the Palatine library during the reign of Augustus Caesar. De Astronomica states, in a literal translation, that “The Sun’s star…body is large [i.e. bright], and color/coloration fiery/burning; similar to that star which is in the right shoulder of Orion [i.e. Betelgeuse]…Many have said that this star is [the star] of Saturn.
As an aside, the tradition of calling Saturn ‘the Sun’s star’, as Hyginus does, can be traced as far back as early Babylonian texts, and may have originated because Saturn’s movement in the sky is the steadiest of all the planets, and its synodic period (its apparent movement in the sky) closely matches the length of the solar year. Hyginus describes Betelgeuse’s color as Saturn-like, which is distinctly not red (Mars would be the obvious comparison for a red star). This suggests that nearly two thousand years ago, Betelgeuse may not yet have entered its current life stage as a red supergiant.
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