This summer, professional and amateur astronomers around the world will focus on a small constellation deep in the night sky. But it was not the “Northern Crown”, the seven stars of the Corona Borealis, that caused such admiration. It is a dark spot bright enough to be seen with the naked eye from Earth, between which a new event may occur.

“This once-in-a-lifetime event will create many new astronomers and give young people the opportunity to observe a cosmic event, ask their own questions and collect their own data,” Dr Rebecca said. Hounsell is a research assistant specializing in new developments at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It will nourish the next generation of scientists.”

Nicknamed the “Fiery Star” and known to astronomers simply as “T CrB”, T Coronae Borealis is a binary system located in the Northern Corona, approximately 3,000 light-years from Earth. The system consists of a white dwarf (the Earth-sized remnant of a dead star with a mass similar to that of our Sun) and a former red giant that is slowly being stripped of hydrogen by the relentless gravity of its hungry neighbor.

The red giant’s hydrogen accumulates on the white dwarf’s surface, causing pressure and temperature to increase. It eventually causes a thermonuclear explosion powerful enough to blow up the accumulated material. For T CrB, this event repeats on average every 80 years.

Don’t confuse a nova with a supernova, the final massive explosion that destroys some dying stars, Hounsell said. During the new event, the dwarf star remains intact and sends accumulating material into space in a dazzling flash. The cycle often repeats over time, and this process can last tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

“There are a few recurring novae with very short cycles, but overall we don’t see a repeated outburst within a human lifetime, and rarely one relatively close to our own system,” Hounsell said. “Having that front row seat is incredibly exciting.”

Finding T Corona Borealis

The first recorded sighting of a new T CrB occurred more than 800 years ago, in the autumn of 1217, when a man named Burchard, abbot of Ursberg, Germany, reported observing “a dim star that shone for a time with a great light.” “

Nova T CrB was last seen from Earth in 1946. Its behavior over the past decade appears strikingly similar to that observed over a similar period of time leading up to the 1946 eruption. Some researchers say that if this situation continues, another event may occur by September 2024.

What should the stars look for? The northern corona is a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars west of the constellation Hercules, perfectly visible on a clear night. They can be identified by identifying Arcturus and Vega, the two brightest stars in the northern hemisphere, and tracing a straight line from one to the other, which will direct observers to Hercules and Corona Borealis.

The flash will be brief. It will be visible to the naked eye for less than a week after the explosion, but Hounsell is confident it will be quite a sight.

A consistent scientific approach

Director of NASA’s Goddard Astroparticle Physics Laboratory, Dr. Elizabeth Hayes agrees. Part of the fun of preparing to observe the event, he said, was watching the enthusiasm of stargazers whose passion for extreme space phenomena has helped foster a long and mutually beneficial partnership with NASA.

“Public scientists and space enthusiasts are always looking for strong, bright signals that identify new events and other events,” Hayes said. “They will send out push notifications using social media and email and the flag will go up. We look forward to once again engaging the global community with T CrB.”

Hayes is the project scientist for NASA’s Fermi Space Gamma Ray Telescope, which has been observing gamma rays in low Earth orbit since 2008. Fermi, along with other space missions including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, IXPE (Imaging ready. (Neutron Star Interior Composition Surveyor) and the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL (Extreme Universe Surveyor).

Multiple ground-based radio telescopes and optical cameras will also participate, including the Very Large Array at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in New Mexico. Various telescopes and instruments together will collect data across the visible and invisible spectrum of light.

“We will watch the new event at its peak and then decline as the visible energy of the flare dissipates,” Hounsell said. “But it is equally important to obtain data during the early rise before an explosion, so the data collected by enthusiastic citizen scientists currently searching for a nova will greatly contribute to our results.”

For astrophysicists, this promises a rare opportunity to shed new light on the structure and dynamics of repeated star explosions like this.

“Often new phenomena are so faint and distant that it is difficult to clearly determine where the energy of the explosion is concentrated,” Hayes said. said. “It’s going to be very close, it’s going to get a lot of attention, it’s going to look at different wavelengths, and hopefully it’s going to give us the data we need to start unlocking the structure and specific processes. We can’t wait to see the full picture of what’s going on.”

Some of these eyes will be brand new. A gamma camera was not available at the time of T CrB’s last explosion in 1946, and the polarization ability of IXPE, which determines the organization and alignment of electromagnetic waves to determine the structure and internal processes of high-energy phenomena, is also completely new. A tool in X-ray astronomy. Combining their data could offer unprecedented insight into the life cycles of binary systems and the waning but powerful stellar processes that power them.

Is there any chance that September will come and go without a new outbreak expected from T CrB? Experts agree there are no guarantees, but there is still hope.

NASA Goddard Astrophysics Research Fellow Dr. “Recurring novae are unpredictable and controversial,” said Koji Mukai.

“Just when you think there’s no reason why they might follow a certain pattern, they do, and when you start relying on them repeating the same pattern, they completely deviate from that pattern. We’ll see how T CrB behaves.’