The night sky may be on the verge of getting a brand new star for a few weeks.
T Coronae Borealis, also known as the “Blaze Star” or T CrB, is a binary star system located about 3,000 light-years from Earth. Each day is set to explode in spectacular fashion.
T CrB, which is usually too faint to be seen with the naked eye, is expected to temporarily shine brighter than 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 galaxy. It consists of a white dwarf and a red giant orbiting each other in a binary system, with the white dwarf undergoing a strange periodic nova explosion every 80 years or so — the last of which was observed in 1946. The researchers noted that the recent behavior is strikingly similar to the period, that preceded its last eruption, indicating that another eruption is imminent by September of this year.
How to recognize T CrB
To find T CrB, observers should look to the Northern Hemisphere summer sky. T CrB is located in the constellation Corona Borealis, a distinctive horseshoe-shaped pattern of stars located between the constellations Hercules and Boöta. To find it, draw a straight line between the two brightest stars in the Northern Hemisphere – Arcturus and Vega – and then look between them to find the arc-shaped Corona Borealis. You can pinpoint the reddish Arcturus by following the handle of the Big Dipper constellation.
The eruption, once it occurs, will be visible for less than a week. Observers should look up into the night sky shortly after sunset for the best chance of seeing the new moon. The exact timing is unpredictable, but astronomers are confident the event will occur by September 2024. Hopeful stargazers will get the best view of the star away from light pollution.
Normally, T CrB has +10 size, making it invisible to the naked eye. Magnitudes in astronomy are measured backwards, with a lower number or a higher negative number indicating that the object is brighter – the full Moon has a magnitude of -13, while the stars Sirius and Arcturus have magnitudes of -1.5 and -0.05. If the object is magnitude +6 or smaller, it will be visible to the naked eye. T CrB is expected to reach around +2 magnitude at its brightest, shining about as brightly as Polaris, the 48th brightest star in our sky.
NASA
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that will create lots of new astronomers and give young people a cosmic event to observe for themselves, ask their own questions and collect their own data,” says Rebekah Hounsell. an associate scientist specializing in nova events at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a NASA statement. “It will drive the next generation of scientists.”
T CrB undergoes novae every 80 years or so due to a strange property of the white dwarf-red giant binary system. A remnant of a collapsed star’s core, the white dwarf slowly steals hydrogen gas from the red giant’s atmosphere, expanding and heating up, eventually exploding in a thermonuclear explosion known as a nova. These novae are less powerful than supernovae, 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 approximately once every 80 years. The star system behaved in a very similar way to how it did just before the last explosion, making astronomers fairly certain that a nova would occur by September of this year.
“There are a few recurring novae with very short cycles, but we don’t usually see repeated flares very often in human lifetimes, and rarely ones that are relatively close to our own system,” Hounsell said. “It’s incredibly exciting to have this front row seat.”
Astronomers hope to study the upcoming nova in detail using various telescopes around the world, including the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope.
“Nova events are usually so faint and distant that it is difficult to clearly identify where the eruptive energy is concentrated,” said Elizabeth Hays, head of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory at NASA Goddard. “This one is going to be really close, there’s going to be a lot of eyes on it, it’s going to study different wavelengths and hopefully it’s going to give us the data to start unlocking the structure and the specific processes involved. We can’t wait to get the full picture of it , what’s happening.” “
However, there is a small chance that the nova will not occur at all before September.
“Recurring novae are unpredictable and contradictory,” Koji Mukai, an astrophysics researcher at NASA Goddard, said in a statement. “Just when you think there can be no reason why they follow a certain set pattern, they do – and once you start relying on them repeating the same pattern, they completely deviate from it. We’ll see how T CrB behaves.”
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