Sometime between now and September, a huge explosion will appear in the night sky 3,000 light-years from Earth
The binary star system in the constellation Corona Borealis (Corona Borealis) is usually too faint to see with the naked eye. But about every 80 years, an out-of-control nuclear explosion occurs as a result of the exchange between the two stars, which are in a deadly embrace.
The light from the explosion travels through the cosmos, making it appear as if a new star – as bright as the North Star, according to NASA – had suddenly appeared in our night sky for a few days.
It will be at least the third time people have witnessed the event, which was first discovered by Irish polymath John Birmingham in 1866 and resurfaced in 1946. Sumner Starrfield, an astronomer at Arizona State University, told AFP that he was very excited to see the nova’s “explosion.” After all, he has been working on T Coronae Borealis – also known as the “Blaze Star” – since the 1960s. worked.
Starrfield is currently working on completing a paper predicting what astronomers will find out about the recurring nova when it occurs in the next five months.
The white dwarf and the red giant
According to Starrfield, there are only about ten recurring novae in the Milky Way and surrounding galaxies. Normal novae explode about every 100,000 years, but recurring novae repeat their explosions on a human timeline due to a special relationship between their two stars.
One of them is a cold, dying star called a red giant that has burned all of its hydrogen and expanded enormously, a fate that awaits our sun in about five billion years.
The other is a white dwarf, a later stage of star death when all of the atmosphere is gone and only the incredibly dense core remains.
Their size difference is so great that it takes the white dwarf T Coronae Borealis 227 days to orbit its red giant. The two are so close together that the material ejected by the red giant accumulates near the surface of the white dwarf.
Once the white dwarf reaches an Earth-like mass, which takes about 80 years, it heats up so much that a thermonuclear reaction is triggered. This ends in a huge explosion and within a few seconds the temperature rises to 100 to 200 million degrees.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be just one of many eyes on the T Coronae Borealis burst once it begins. But you don’t need such advanced technology to witness this rare event whenever it occurs. If we are lucky enough to be in the southern hemisphere at this time, it will be enough to go out and look in the direction of the constellation Corona Borealis.