July 11th, 2024
As of 2024, stargazers are possible on the verge of witnessing a fairly rare event in the night sky called a “Nova”, which literally means “new star”. In this case, the star is known as “T Coronae Borealis” or TCrB for short; there is a star chart in that link to help you find it. As luck would have it, the constellation CrB is right overhead in tonight’s sky around 10:00 EDT.
This is a fairly rare type of nova event in that it’s a process between both members of a binary system, made up of a red giant and a white dwarf. The pair of stars interact about every 70-80 years when hydrogen gas is pulled from the red giant and “piles up”. That leads to a condition on the white dwarf’s surface where a thermonuclear explosion occurs. At that time, the visual magnitude of the pair will brighten from the normal value of 10-10.8 to about 2.0. That’s about the same brightness as Polaris, The North Star. So, this nova event will be visible to the naked eye and roughly located between the bright stars Arcturus and Vega.
The Oxford dictionary defines Nova as “a star showing a sudden large increase in brightness and then slowly returning to its original state over a few months”. The star will brighten due to eruptions of the star due to different effects however it settles down to repeat the cycle. So, its not the same as a Supernova or Hypernova in which the star self destructs as a result of the complete explosion of the star.
As for T Crb, there is a growing anticipation that it will soon erupt once again, as the previously recorded bursts have recorded. The last time this occurred was 1946 (78 years ago), before that it was in 1866 (80 years previous). You can check the status of the magnitude of T CrB on the SpaceWeather site in the right hand side bar.
I will be posting more information and web links in the coming days. So, keep an eye on this site and both eyes open to the sky for this unusual event.
Updated on 7-11-24
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