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Sometime between now and September, a massive explosion 3,000 light years from Earth will flare up in the night sky, giving amateur astronomers a once-in-a-lifetime chance to witness this space oddity.<\/p>\n The binary star system in the constellation Corona Borealis\u2014”northern crown”\u2014is normally too dim to see with the naked eye.<\/p>\n But every 80 years or so, exchanges between its two stars, which are locked in a deadly embrace, spark a runaway nuclear explosion.<\/p>\n The light from the blast travels through the cosmos and makes it appear as if a new star\u2014as bright as the North Star, according to NASA\u2014has suddenly just popped up in our night sky for a few days.<\/p>\n It will be at least the third time that humans have witnessed this event, which was first discovered by Irish polymath John Birmingham in 1866, then reappeared in 1946.<\/p>\n The appropriately named Sumner Starrfield, an astronomer at Arizona State University, told AFP he was very excited to see the nova’s “outburst”.<\/p>\n After all, he has worked on T Coronae Borealis\u2014also known as the “Blaze Star”\u2014on and off since the 1960s.<\/p>\n Starrfield is currently rushing to finish a scientific paper predicting what astronomers will find out about the recurring nova whenever it shows up in the next five months.<\/p>\n “I could be today… but I hope it’s not,” he said with a laugh.<\/p>\n There are only around 10 recurring novas in the Milky Way and surrounding galaxies, Starrfield explained.<\/p>\n Normal novas explode “maybe every 100,000 years,” he said. But recurrent novas repeat their outbursts on a human timeline because of a peculiar relationship between their two stars.<\/p>\n One is a cool dying star called a red giant, which has burnt through its hydrogen and has hugely expanded\u2014a fate that is awaiting our own sun in around five billion years.<\/p>\n The other is a white dwarf, a later stage in the death of a star, after all the atmosphere has blown away and only the incredibly dense core remains.<\/p>\n Their size disparity is so huge that it takes T Coronae Borealis’s white dwarf 227 days to orbit its red giant, Starrfield said.<\/p>\n The two are so close that matter being ejected by the red giant collects near the surface of the white dwarf.<\/p>\n Once the mass roughly of Earth has built up on the white dwarf\u2014which takes around 80 years\u2014it heats up enough to kickstart a runaway thermonuclear reaction, Starrfield said.<\/p>\n This ends up in a “big explosion and within a few seconds the temperature goes up 100-200 million degrees” Celsius, said Joachim Krautter, a retired German astronomer who has studied the nova.<\/p>\n The James Webb space telescope will be just one of the many eyes that turn towards the outburst of T Coronae Borealis once it begins, Krautter told AFP.<\/p>\n But you do not need such advanced technology to witness this rare event\u2014whenever it may happen.<\/p>\n “You simply have to go out and look in the direction of the Corona Borealis,” Krautter said.<\/p>\n Some lucky sky gazers are already preparing for the year’s biggest astronomic event on Monday, when a rare total solar eclipse will occur across a strip of the United States.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t \u00a9 2024 AFP\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t <\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCitation<\/strong>: \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, noThe white dwarf and red giant<\/h2>\n
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