Betelgeuse and 2012

I swear, I need to trust my instincts. As soon as I saw the article on the news.com.au site desperately trying to link Betelgeuse going supernova with the nonsense about the Mayans and 2012, my gut reaction was to write about it. But no, I figured a minute later, this story would blow over. So to speak. I should've known: instead of going away, it gets picked up by that bastion of antiscience, The Huffington Post. Grrrr. The actual science in the original article is pretty good; they talked with scientist Brad Carter who discusses the scenario of Betelgeuse going supernova. The whole story is pretty interesting -- I wrote about it in detail the last time there was nonsense about Betelgeuse blowing up -- but in a nutshell Betelgeuse is a red supergiant star in Orion with about 20 times the mass of the Sun, and it's very near ...