05-21-2024, 06:58 PM
This post was last modified 05-22-2024, 05:28 AM by Maxmars.
Edit Reason: added content
Something to look up for...,
It has been determined that at some point between May and September this year we should see a new star... or rather suddenly see a star that was mostly too dim to ever see in the night sky... in the Northern Crown constellation...
You see there are two closely orbiting stars one relatively huge and hulking, the other relatively puny and dim. The star system is called T. Coronae Borealis, (a.k.a. the Blaze Star.) (But it's actually two stars, a red giant, and a white dwarf.)
Every 80 years or so the white dwarf gets 'fed up' (pun intended) with all the matter ejected by the Red Giant - which subsequently became 'captured' by the white dwarf. After enough of this accumulates the little companion "puffs it off" in a blast so powerful that the star becomes 10,000 times brighter for a short while.
From ArsTechnica.com: Nova explosion visible to the naked eye expected any day now
Subtitled: Sometime between May and September, a white dwarf is expected to go thermonuclear.
“The material from the red giant will accumulate on the white dwarf’s surface until it forms a layer that’s actually not that thick. Just a few meters—the depth of a deep swimming pool,” Van Belle explained. Most of the material coming off the red giant is hydrogen. And since the red dwarf is still hot, there will eventually be a spark that triggers a runaway nuclear fusion reaction. “That is what causes the explosion,” Van Belle said.
The explosion is a nova, which means it doesn’t kill either the white dwarf or the red giant as a supernova would. “Only about 5 percent of the hydrogen layer fuses into heavier elements like helium, and the rest just gets ejected into space. Then the process starts all over again because the explosion isn’t large enough to disrupt the red giant, the donor of all this hydrogen, so it just keeps doing its thing,” Van Belle told Ars. This is why we can predict this event with such precision.
...
We can estimate this window because we know what the events leading up to the T. Coronae Borealis explosion looked like the last time it went off in 1946. “The brightness of this object in the sky got a little bit dimmer, a little fingerprint in the light curve. Then it popped off. We have seen the same process with this object recently during the last year or year-and-a-half or so. So that’s why we expect that it is getting to that point,” Van Belle explained.
Accordingly, many high-precision instruments at Lowell and other observatories will be zeroed in on T. Coronae Borealis in the coming months to measure the geometry of the expanding fireball to infer the exact physics of the explosion. “But it’s also kind of neat that you don’t need anything if you fancy to go out and see this thing. Last time, in 1946, it hit magnitude 3, and prior to that, in 1866, it was magnitude 2. Magnitude 2 is about as bright as the Northern Star,” Van Belle said.
![[Image: NovaCygni_ArtistConcept_watermarked-ezgi...timize.gif]](https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/04/NovaCygni_ArtistConcept_watermarked-ezgif.com-optimize.gif)
It has been determined that at some point between May and September this year we should see a new star... or rather suddenly see a star that was mostly too dim to ever see in the night sky... in the Northern Crown constellation...
You see there are two closely orbiting stars one relatively huge and hulking, the other relatively puny and dim. The star system is called T. Coronae Borealis, (a.k.a. the Blaze Star.) (But it's actually two stars, a red giant, and a white dwarf.)
Every 80 years or so the white dwarf gets 'fed up' (pun intended) with all the matter ejected by the Red Giant - which subsequently became 'captured' by the white dwarf. After enough of this accumulates the little companion "puffs it off" in a blast so powerful that the star becomes 10,000 times brighter for a short while.
From ArsTechnica.com: Nova explosion visible to the naked eye expected any day now
Subtitled: Sometime between May and September, a white dwarf is expected to go thermonuclear.
“The material from the red giant will accumulate on the white dwarf’s surface until it forms a layer that’s actually not that thick. Just a few meters—the depth of a deep swimming pool,” Van Belle explained. Most of the material coming off the red giant is hydrogen. And since the red dwarf is still hot, there will eventually be a spark that triggers a runaway nuclear fusion reaction. “That is what causes the explosion,” Van Belle said.
The explosion is a nova, which means it doesn’t kill either the white dwarf or the red giant as a supernova would. “Only about 5 percent of the hydrogen layer fuses into heavier elements like helium, and the rest just gets ejected into space. Then the process starts all over again because the explosion isn’t large enough to disrupt the red giant, the donor of all this hydrogen, so it just keeps doing its thing,” Van Belle told Ars. This is why we can predict this event with such precision.
...
We can estimate this window because we know what the events leading up to the T. Coronae Borealis explosion looked like the last time it went off in 1946. “The brightness of this object in the sky got a little bit dimmer, a little fingerprint in the light curve. Then it popped off. We have seen the same process with this object recently during the last year or year-and-a-half or so. So that’s why we expect that it is getting to that point,” Van Belle explained.
Accordingly, many high-precision instruments at Lowell and other observatories will be zeroed in on T. Coronae Borealis in the coming months to measure the geometry of the expanding fireball to infer the exact physics of the explosion. “But it’s also kind of neat that you don’t need anything if you fancy to go out and see this thing. Last time, in 1946, it hit magnitude 3, and prior to that, in 1866, it was magnitude 2. Magnitude 2 is about as bright as the Northern Star,” Van Belle said.
