The night sky might be about to get a brand new star in a few weeks.
T Coronae Borealis, also known as the “Blaze Star” or T CrB, is a binary star system located approximately 3,000 light-years from Earth. It could explode in spectacular fashion any day now.
Normally too dim to see with the naked eye, T CrB is expected to temporarily shine brighter than the North Star Polaris during its explosion, known as a ‘nova’.
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
T CrB is one of only five known recurring novae in our Milky Way. It consists of a white dwarf and a red giant orbiting each other in a binary system, with the white dwarf undergoing a strange, regular nova explosion about every 80 years – the last of which was observed in 1946. Researchers have noted that the star’s recent behavior is strikingly similar to the period leading up to the last outburst, suggesting that another outburst is imminent before September this year.
How to recognize T CrB
To locate T CrB, sky watchers must look at the northern hemisphere summer sky. T CrB is located in the constellation Corona Borealis, a striking horseshoe-shaped pattern of stars located between the constellations Hercules and Boötes. To find it, draw a straight line between the two brightest stars in the Northern Hemisphere – Arcturus and Vega – and look between them to locate the arc-shaped Corona Borealis. You can locate the reddish-colored Arcturus by following the handle of the Ursa Major constellation.
Once the explosion occurs, it will be visible for less than a week. Observers should look at the night sky shortly after sunset for the best chance of seeing the nova. The precise timing is unpredictable, but astronomers are confident the event will occur in September 2024. Hopeful stargazers will get the best view of the star far away from light pollution.
Normally, T CrB has a magnitude of +10, making it invisible to the naked eye. Magnitudes in astronomy are measured backwards, with a lower number or a higher negative number meaning an object is brighter: the full moon has a magnitude of -13, while the stars Sirius and Arcturus have magnitudes of -1.5 and – respectively. have 0.05. If an object has a magnitude of +6 or less, it is visible to the naked eye. At its brightest, T CrB is expected to reach a magnitude of about +2 and shine about as brightly as Polaris, the 48th brightest star in our sky.
NASA
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that will create many new astronomers, giving young people a cosmic event that they can observe for themselves, ask their own questions and collect their own data,” said Rebekah Hounsell, one of the researchers. assistant researcher specializing in nova events at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a NASA statement. “It will fuel the next generation of scientists.”
T CrB goes nova about every 80 years due to a strange property of the white dwarf-red giant binary system. The white dwarf, the remnant core of a collapsed star, slowly steals hydrogen gases from the red giant’s atmosphere, growing bigger and hotter until it finally explodes in a thermonuclear explosion known as a nova. These novas are less powerful than supernovas, which completely destroy a star at the end of its life.
After this explosion, the process starts again from scratch. This is why T CrB explodes about once every 80 years. The star system is behaving in a similar way to just before the last explosion, making astronomers fairly confident that a nova will occur before September this year.
“There are a few recurring novae with very short cycles, but typically we don’t see a repeat eruption very often in a lifetime, and rarely one that is so relatively close to our own system,” Hounsell said. “It’s incredibly exciting to have this front row seat.”
Astronomers hope to study the coming nova in detail using a variety of telescopes around the world, including NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
“Normally, nova events are so faint and distant that it is difficult to clearly identify where the eruptive energy is concentrated,” Elizabeth Hays, head of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA Goddard, said in the statement. “This will be very close, with many eyes on it, studying the different wavelengths and hopefully giving us data to unlock the structure and the specific processes involved. We can’t wait to get the full picture of what’s going on.”
However, there’s a slim chance that the nova won’t happen at all before September.
“Recurring novae are unpredictable and unruly,” Koji Mukai, an astrophysics researcher at NASA Goddard, said in the statement. ‘If you think there can’t possibly be a reason for them to follow a certain pattern, then they do – and as soon as you start relying on them to repeat the same pattern, they deviate from it completely. We’ll see how T CrB behaves.”
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.