Timely Topic: Get Ready To View the Once-in-a-Lifetime ‘Blaze Star’
06.26.2024
This illustration depicts how a white dwarf star produces a nova (left) by siphoning material from a red giant star. (NASA/Conceptual Image Lab/Goddard Space Flight Center)
Sometime between now and September, a dim star in the constellation Corona Borealis – the Northern Crown – is expected to experience an intense but temporary brightening that will make it visible to the naked eye for a few days.
The small, white dwarf star is known as a recurrent nova. It is visible to viewers in the Northern Hemisphere about every 80 years when the hydrogen it draws from its giant companion star builds up and triggers a thermonuclear explosion. Some astronomers liken it to a giant hydrogen bomb that blasts off the atmosphere of the Earth-size white dwarf.
Away from bright city lights, viewers can find the constellation high in the eastern sky – the star grouping looks like a backward letter “C.”
T Coronae Borealis, nicknamed the “Blaze Star,” will appear just below the bottom right of the C shape.
The “Blaze Star” will appear high in the eastern sky just below the bottom right of the C-shaped constellation Corona Borealis, about midway between the two bright stars Arcturus and Vega. (Screenshot image from stellarium-web.org)
Dr. Marc Hairston, a research scientist in the William B. Hanson Center for Space Sciences at The University of Texas at Dallas, says we will not know how bright the star will get until it actually happens.
“Although it should look like an average star, this nova occurs only every 80 years, so it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event,” Hairston says. The nova’s last appearance was in 1946.
Hairston and Dr. Phillip Anderson, director of the space sciences center, teach astronomy and will be actively tracking the star’s outburst. Anderson talks about the Blaze Star in class discussions on stellar evolution, or how stars change over their lifetimes. The scientists are interested in what causes the nova to occur, and where and how viewers can see it.
–Amanda Siegfried
Note to journalists: Dr. Marc Hairston and Dr. Phillip Anderson are available for news media interviews. Contact Amanda Siegfried, 972-883-4335, amanda.siegfried@utdallas.edu.