Betelgeuse to explode.

I was watching BBC Stargazing live recently and happened to hear some amazing stuff. Professor Brian Cox says "The most interesting star, the star that could be shocking in our sky" referring to Betelgeuse. "Its an enormous star and about to explode", "May be one of the most amazing astronomical events of our lifetime", "It would shine like a second sun in the sky". Now thats truly amazing. For those of you who do not know Professor Brian Cox,

Dr. Brian Edward “B. E.” Cox OBE, M.Phil., PhD. (born 3 March 1968) is a British particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. He is also working on the R&D project of the FP420 experiment in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 metres (1,380 ft) from the interaction points of the main experiments.

He is best known to the public as the presenter of a number of science programmes for the BBC. He also had some fame in the 1980s as the keyboard player in the rock band Dare and in the early 1990s with the Irish pop band D:Ream.


See him speak on BBC stargazing live, here:

If this explosion happens and the star shines like a second sun in the sky, How long will it shine? Will there be any side effects of this explosion on earth? Any harmful radiation which we might encounter? How will we know? We have started seeing its rapid shrinking only recently, considering that its 640 light years away, HAS IT EXPLODED ALREADY? After Betelgeuse is gone, Orion wont resemble the hunter anymore, what name do we give to this constellation then?


More related links here:
Will the earth have 2 suns by 2012 ?
Famous star is shrinking, National Geographic.