WILL BETELGEUSE GO SUPERNOVA IN 2012?
Nice Matrix, but the scientific odds say it's a longshot.
On January 11, 2011 Fox News published a story about the possibility of the red giant star Betelgeuse going supernova and threatening Earth with radiation in 2012. Of course, 2012 is the much hyped year when the Mayan calendar comes to an end. I checked the Torah Code to see what, if anything, it had about this. Don’t worry so much about 2012. On the matrix below one transliteration of BETELGEUSE is shown at its 4th lowest ELS in a nice meeting with STARS OF HEAVEN in the open text. It takes just 132 letters to show both terms (Note: the dictionary spelling for Betelgeuse - bet yud tav alef lamed gimel vav zayin - does not occur at an ELS). When the matrix expands to 432 letters (white and blue backgrounds) we RADIATION at the same absolute skip as BETELGEUSE, but in the opposite direction. Expand the matrix more, to 644 letters and – oh, my – the current year (5)771/2011 shows up! Are we doomed? I don’ think so (for reasons pertaining to distance given in the Fox story below). But hey, maybe the matrix appeared just to honor Fox News. There is a transliteration of FOX at skip +1 also on it. The issue here is not our doom, but how fast Hollywood can adapt to get out a global killer film about 2011. Statistical significance of the matrix is discussed after the Fox story.
Dying Star Betelgeuse Won't Explode in 2012, Experts Say
Published January 21, 2011
FoxNews.com
The super-giant red star Betelgeuse in Orion’s nebula is predicted to cataclysmically explode, and the impending supernova may even reach Earth -- someday.
But will it happen by 2012, as recent news reports suggest? Probably not, experts told FoxNews.com. While the second biggest star in the universe is strangely losing mass -- and has already become a red giant, meaning it is destined to explode and become a supernova -- there's no reason to believe that it will happen anytime soon.
"The story is pretty 'Hollywoody,'" said New Jersey Institute of Technology professor Philip R. Goode. In reality, the stars eventual explosion is inevitable, but no one knows when it will happen, he explained -- 2012 is pure conjecture.
"Betelgeuse is a red supergiant and should supernova at some time. When? Who knows?" he told FoxNews.com.
Phil Plait, an astronomer who writes for Discovery News, agrees that someday, Betelgeuse will go gangbusters. But it’s way too far away to hurt us, he explained.
The first direct image of a star other than the Sun, made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Called Alpha Orionis, or Betelgeuse, it is a red supergiant star marking the shoulder of the winter constellation Orion the Hunter (diagram at right).
"A supernova has to be no farther than about 25 light years away to be able to fry us with light or anything else, and Betelgeuse is 25 times that distance," Plait wrote on his blog The Bad Astronomer.
The story was fueled by Australian news site News.com.au -- also owned by FoxNews.com parent company News Corp. -- which predicted that a giant explosion will occur, tens of millions of times brighter than the sun, and suggested the event was imminent. And the gist of the story is accurate: Betelgeuse will blow, in an explosion that will be visible from Earth, though it won't be so bright as to appear like a "second sun."
“This old star is running out of fuel in its center,” Carter told News.com.au. “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.”
“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.”
When Betelgeuse does blow, it will definitely be visible, Goode confirmed.
"One could roughly expect it to be as bright as a full moon and gradually fade away over a few months. Everyone on Earth would notice and be talking about it," he told FoxNews.com. Goode also noted that, due to the time required for light from the star to reach Earth, the event would be old history by the time we could see it.
"Betelgeuse is several hundred light years away, so if it were to light up the sky in 2012 it would have exploded in the Middle Ages," he said.
The news reports of Betelgeuse's imminent demise are nevertheless fueling Internet rumors and doomsday theories by confounding the impending supernova with the Mayan calendar’s end in 2012 -- which some believe is a prediction of the end of the world.
But again, there's no reason to think Betelgeuse will blow in 2012, Plait explains -- or even this millennium.
"It’s hard to know just when a star will explode when you’re on the outside. Betelgeuse might go up tonight, or it might not be for 100,000 years. We’re just not sure," Plait explained.
Goode agreed. "If you want to bet on it, it's better to try the lottery," he said.
STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE MATRIX. BETELGEUSE is only shown at its 4th lowest ELS, which means that I divide the overall significance by 4. It took multiple passes through the 304,805 letters of Torah to find this axis term. In fact, the matrix spans 1,457,697 letters which is about 4.78 times the length of one computer pass through the Torah. Sought, but not found, was the expression END OF DAYS. I would it expect it to be there, with the axis term at a lower skip and ELS rank if this were a warning about the end of the world.
The first key term sought and found was STARS OF HEAVEN in the open text. It had about 1 chance in 96 to be seen in the 132-letter matrix shown with the white background. It’s significance drops as the matrix expands to show other key words, but what is nice about the other key words on the matrix is that they are either at the absolute skip of the axis term (making them stand out as being parallel to the axis term), or at skip +1. Skip +1 is the best case scenario for a key word sought, whereas skip -1, N (the skip of the axis term – here 112,127), and –N are other interesting skips that deserve special weight. On this matrix, the best key word in terms of statistical significance was RADIATION. The odds of seeing it in it the 432-letter matrix (white and blue backgrounds) were long because this words only appears once at the special case skips searched. Combined odds with BETELGEUSE and STARS OF HEAVEN were 1 chance in 20,845.
The last term initially sought was the year 2012. It is composed of part of two Hebrew years, 5772 and 5773. Neither of these years is on the matrices shown. I checked the current year ((5)771/2011) and found that a short form of it was there at the same skip as BETELGEUSE, but it required an expansion of the matrix to 644 letters to see. This Hebrew year ends on the night of September 28, 2011, which means that the timing aspect of the bigger matrix becomes obsolete at that time unless the year should just be related to the story. Since the story was carried by Fox News, I sought FOX and was surprised to find a transliteration of it there at skip +1. The combined odds are based on 4 transliterations and two Hebrew terms for FOX plus appropriate frequencies for 2011 and 2012. The large matrix was rated at 1 chance in 13,863,158, but common sense is that an encoded warning is more likely to be about an actual threat than a news story about why the threat should not be taken seriously.
