Today, I saw that a lot of astronomers/astrophysicists were talking about #Betelgeuse . Indeed, according to many, Betelgeuse luminosity seems to be quite low. Some say it’s extraordinary, others say it happens quite often, but all (secretly or not) hope for a supernova. 1/7
Even if I don’t believe it is likely that a supernova will happen in the next weeks, I wanted to know if this dimming was actually extraordinary. I looked at the AAVSO data, like everyone. At first, I saw what I already saw on Twitter (see figure): it seemed like it already 2/7 
happened 5 times during the last 50 years. But I dug a little deeper, and I saw that in November 1985, when the luminosity was very low, a group of astronomers (Rodrigues A., Paulo) had made many measurements. ALL were very low in brightness (most around 1.8), and quite far 3/7
from other astronomers’ measurements. And I thought that I had to exclude this group of astronomers from the data, but also the others which had that kind of results. So I looked at every astronomer, and I calculated their average magnitude measured. Then, I compared it to 4/7
the overall magnitude average (during the same period of time). And I excluded all astronomers who had average magnitudes further than 0.3 from the overall average. I also excluded the average data points made from less than 10 data. Indeed, an average is supposed to smooth 5/7
measurements errors, but if we average only 1 data, and that it is wrong, the average will also be very wrong. And I got this curve (see figure). Here, it is a lot clearer that what is happening this week has never happened in the past 50 years. It might not be a sign of an 6/7
incoming supernova, but it remains exceptional, fascinating, as space always is. Thanks for reading me! (if I find some other interesting stuff about Betelgeuse, I’ll tweet it) @EricMamajek @NatureAstronomy @david_kipping @coreyspowell @chrislintott @JPMajor @podcastwow 7/7
These are my first tweets ever, and I'm really happy that many people (and only grear people) like it, so I promise I will try to post more space stuff in the future 😄
