My first order of business, is to correct a typo, in the last line of “Part 1”: The fusion of helium into carbon begins at 100 million K, not 600. It’s carbon that fuses at 600 K. (Teachers, kindly take note.)

Meanwhile, low-mass stars, like our Sun, cannot fuse elements heavier than helium. Their internal gravity is too weak, to generate the required temperatures.

Not so, with Antares. Most investigators believe the supergiant has gone beyond helium-fusion and begun gobbling up metals which, in astronomy, includes all elements, except hydrogen and helium.

Astrophysics Spectator.Com notes, in this regard, that after high-mass stars have fused helium into carbon, “the next fusion stage is reached: the burning of carbon into heavier elements”.

Having had their light aperitif, Antares-type supergiants then munch their way through weightier elemental cuisine, such as carbon, oxygen, neon, magnesium and silicon.

In theory, Antares should now be greedily gulping down this delectable atomic fare—consuming and re-digesting progressively heavier nuclei, one after the other, and licking its chops for silicon.

But when the fusion of iron from silicon occurs, it will be Antares’ last ravenous meal: The death-row feast of a condemned star.

“With iron,” says teachastronomy.com, “the fusion process reaches an insurmountable obstacle. Iron has the most stable nuclear configuration… energy is consumed, not produced, as iron nuclei fuse…”

Unable to generate heat, from nuclear fusion, the cooling core produces no outward pressure, to counter the inward pull of gravity. The star thus collapses, and violently self-destructs.

Just when Antares will go supernova, is anybody’s guess. But astronomers believe it must, eventually. They cite its bloated structure, which has swollen to some four times the distance from Earth to the Sun.

If Antares were transported to the center of our solar system, scientists conjecture, Earth, Mars and the Asteroid Belt would be engulfed.

Also, Dr. John Percy, of University of Toronto (Canada) reports that Antares is losing material at the rate of several solar masses per million years, due to photospheric activity and strong radiation pressure.

Writing on the blog of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, Percy notes that “vast plumes” of this matter extend from “huge convection cells” on the outer layers of the star.

Antares is 550-600 lightyears away. So you would need a powerful telescope to resolve these details. A good viewing instrument is reportedly required as well, to observe the supergiant’s orbital companion.

According to Professor Arnold V. Lesikar, an astronomer at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, (U.S.A.) “Antares B” is a hot blue giant, wider than four of our Suns, with 10 times its mass.

Its beauty notwithstanding, Antares is an oddball of sorts. Though a dying, and comparatively cool supergiant, of spectral class “M,” it associates mainly with hot blue and white stars.

In fact, Antares is a very prominent member of the Scorpius Centaurus Association of “O” and “B” class stars, situated in the Galaxy’s glistening Gould Belt—a band of very bright bodies.

“Sco-Cen,” is the nearest “O-B” association to the Sun. Says blogger David J. Darling, “Many of the bright stars in the constellations Scorpius…are members of the association, including Antares”.

So, I suggest you “wait till the midnight hour,” as soul singer Wilson Picket would put it, and check out the “fire finishing” star in Scorpius constellation—whose nuclear fires are also burning out.

But while scientists are saying the end will come soon, don’t expect to see a supernova. “Soon,” in astronomy, can be a very long time!
Yet, you never can tell!