Constellation Orion is called Rigel. It is 900 light-years away does Rigel still exists?

Lim told Yolanda that he bright blue-white star in the constellation Orion is called Rigel. It is 900 light-years away. Yolanda then wondered whether Rigel still exists. What answer could Lim give Yolanda?Constellation Orion is called Rigel. It is 900 light-years away does Rigel still exists?All true, but I think the point of this junior high conundrum is simply that Lim shoud say we can't be sure. We would know, when we DO see it explode, that it exploded nine hundred years ago.Constellation Orion is called Rigel. It is 900 light-years away does Rigel still exists?I answered this in another post but I'll give you another perspective this time.



Long ago %26lt;if you are using outdated textbooks which I presume is the case%26gt;, scientists and astronomers alike believe that supernova events occur only in red supergiant stars. This was the case until SN 1987A occured in the Large Magellanic Cloud. They identified the progenitor star as a B3Ia star, clearly a blue supergiant. This led to the revisiting and revision of stellar evolution models which suggests that massive stars can enter blue phase after a red supergiant stage and back again. This relates to the onion-layer like structure in the envelope and internal structure of massive stars. Rigel belongs to this class of massive stars. Our best bet is that this is its first ascent into blue supergianthood and that it still has some time before becoming a red supergiant and back again. It will mostly likely not explode in our human lifetime.



More recently, stars called luminous blue variables are found to lurk ina nd around the galaxy. These very massive stars of over a hundred solar masses remain "blue" all the time and so their explosive events would occur at this stage. SN 2006gy is a prime example of a hypernova event for this kind of stars. Eta Carinae is our prime candidate for such an explosion which astronomers even believe might have exploded already if not in the next 10,000 years.



Clear skies!Constellation Orion is called Rigel. It is 900 light-years away does Rigel still exists?Rigel is a bright star, but it still has a lifetime of many millions of years. We see it in a relatively early part of its lifetime, and even after the main sequence phase, it will still have many millions of years to go as a red giant before it goes supernova.



So yes, it still exists, for sure.