Stargazers and astronomers around the world continue to gaze at the constellation Corona Borealis which is 3,000 light years from Earth. In which a long-dead star is expected to reignite in an explosion so powerful that it will momentarily rival the brilliance of Polaris, the North Star.
This dying star last flared nearly 80 years ago and won’t flare again for another 80 years, making it an almost once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Currently, the remnant of the star, a white dwarf called T Coronae Borealis that is absorbing material from a nearby red giant star, has shown clear signs of a decrease in brightness, as it did before its 1946 eruption.
Astronomers don’t know for sure what caused the decline, but they say it’s only a matter of time before the white dwarf satisfies its hunger and explodes into a spectacular nova.
“We knew it was going to explode — very clearly,” Edward Sion, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, told Space.com.
This extraordinary event is not just a treat for sky watchers. Astronomers have devoted precious time with ground-based and space-based telescopes to record every detail to learn more about the nova, whose dynamics remain murky because only a few eruptions have been recorded for decades.
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T Coronae Borealis, or T Cor Bor for short, belongs to the elite club of ten repeating novae known throughout the Milky Way, our home galaxy, giving astronomers a rare opportunity to closely study stellar remnants that consume matter until they eventually collapse and bounce off in explosions. great.
Insights from this event will later enrich models of how stars work, astronomers say.
T Cor Bor is monitored by NASA’s Fermi gamma-ray space telescope every day — and, most of the time, every few hours. Once the nova erupts, gamma rays will surge along with a spike in the nova’s brightness, allowing astronomers to decipher how hot the material was immediately after the eruption, and how quickly it was blown away from the white dwarf.
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Astronomers are also eager to learn more about how the shock wave would have shot through space in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, the details of which are still not well understood.
“Typically, what happens to these white dwarf stars lasts so long that we never see them again,” Elizabeth Hays, Fermi telescope project scientist, told Space.com.
T Cor Bor’s habit of erupting within the human lifespan makes it a unique case study, all the more so because there were no X-ray or gamma-ray telescopes in space 80 years ago — the last time a nova erupted.
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“I’m really excited to see what it looks like — there’s a lot of firsts here,” Hays said.
In addition to the Fermi telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, Swift telescope, and INTEGRAL space telescope, as well as the Very Large Array ground-based telescope in New Mexico will be diverted from their usual observing schedule to observe this event at its peak and until it fades into the void of space. Together, they will capture novae in multiple wavelengths for the first time. “There’s a lot of collaboration when something interesting happens,” Hays said.
This event will only be visible to the naked eye for the first few days, to gamma-ray and X-ray telescopes for several months, and to radio telescopes for years. Long-term observations of the impact of this explosion could reveal how the eruption propagates over time and interacts with its companion red giant star.
Astronomers will also be closely watching how this eruption fades; each “bump” along the way will reveal interesting clues about how the nova interacts with the wind of its companion star, Hays said.
And although the blast was powerful, “it was far enough away that it wouldn’t affect us,” Sion said. (Space/Z-3)
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