When Beetle Juice goes off, it's going to be the show of a lifetime.

And I'm sure most of you are familiar with the star, and if you aren't, you should be.

It's the shoulder of Orion, a red giant sitting about 500 light years away.

It's huge, weighing somewhere between 15 and 20 solar masses, but so extended and bloated

that if you plopped it down in our own solar system, it would stretch to roughly the orbit of Mars. And I'm not sure how to put this

delicately, so I'll just get it out there. It's not doing so great. Massive stars do not live

very long lives with their precise lifetimes depending on a host of factors like their mass,

their metallicity, that's the proportion

of elements heavier than helium, and spin rate. On the low side, we're talking only a few

hundred thousand years. On the high side, we've got a few million. But either way, as stars go,

that's not a lot. Our own sun will outlive multiple generations of such giants, and Red Dwarves, the smallest stars in the universe, can stretch for trillions of years at a time.

In fact, just fun side note, Red Dwarfs live for so long that the entire universe isn't even old enough for them to start dying yet.

But that's a different show.

No matter how you slice it, beetle juice is on its last legs.

It's in what's called the Red Giant Phase, and it's pretty obvious to see why astronomers picked that name for this phase

in a stellar life cycle. It's red, and it's gigantic. And it is so close to being dead that it is

in an incredibly unstable phase. In fact, we saw some very dramatic dimming episodes a few years ago

where it dimmed by like 15% out of nowhere over the course of a few weeks,

and then just after a few months it popped back up and then it got dim again.

And it's just nasty.

And the reason it's nasty is that what's happening in the core

is not sustainable. Like our sun, the core is very stable. It's just doing its thing. It's burning

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