A rare burst of light from a dead star is likely to be visible to humans in earth this summer in a fleeting but potentially gloomy celestial display that scientists are calling “a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
The technical term for the impending cosmic explosion is nova, which occurs when a white dwarf suddenly and often spectacularly lights up in the night sky. A “white dwarf” is how astronomers describe a star at the end of its life cycle, after it has exhausted all its nuclear fuel and is left with only its core. Unlike one supernova – another solar phenomenon visible from Earth, when a star effectively explodes – a nova instead refers to a dramatic ejection of material that a white dwarf has accumulated over time from a nearby younger star his.
“It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event that will create a lot of young astronomers out there, giving young people a cosmic event they can observe for themselves, ask their own questions and collect their own data,” Rebekah said. Hounsell. an assistant research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who specializes in nova events, in a statement. “This will feed the next generation of scientists.”
Between now and September, scientists expect a nova in the Corona Borealis, or northern corona, of Milky Way will send such a powerful flash to ROOM that the naked eye can witness it, NASA recently announced. It will materialize at a dark point in the constellation, where violent interactions between a white dwarf and a red giant are set to culminate in this massive explosion.
A red giant is a dying star in the final stage of its life cycle, becoming increasingly cloudy as it expands and periodically expelling material from its outer layers in intense episodes.
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center
Known together as T Coronae Borealis, also called “The Blazing Star”, the white dwarf and red giant predicted to go nova this summer make up a binary star system in the Northern Corona, located about 3,000 light-years from Earth. . The red giant in this pairing is constantly being stripped of hydrogen as it continues its path toward total collapse, while the nearby white dwarf pulls that material into its orbit, according to NASA. The hydrogen ejected from the red giant accumulates on the surface of the white dwarf over several decades, until the heat and pressure build up enough to cause a full-blown thermonuclear explosion.
The explosion, similar to a nuclear bomb in its appearance, saves the dead STAR of that excess material. The burst will probably be visible on Earth for about a week before it disappears again, but both the white dwarf and the red giant in the Blaze Star system will still be intact whenever it fades. At that point, the process of hydrogen accretion between the two stars begins again and will continue until the accumulation of material in the white dwarf reaches its threshold the next time and suddenly explodes.
Different binary systems like T Coronae Borealis move through this cycle at different speeds. A nova typically erupts from Blaze’s Star about every 80 years or so.
“There are some recurring novae with very short cycles, but typically, we don’t often see a recurring outburst in a human lifetime, and rarely one so relatively close to our system,” Hounsell said. “It’s incredibly exciting to have this front row seat.”
When the nova in T Coronae Borealis eventually occurs, it will be the first such pairing witnessed by Earth since 1946, according to NASA. The agency advised would-be stargazers to look for the Northern Crown, which it describes as “a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars west of the constellation Hercules,” on clear nights. NASA also encouraged citizens to observe the phenomenon as best they can, although its own scientists will study the nova at its peak and throughout its decline.
“But it’s just as important to get data early in the outburst,” Hounsell said, “so the data collected by those eager citizen scientists who are now looking for novae will contribute dramatically to the findings ours.”