Nova explosion visible to the naked eye expected any day now

When you look at the northern sky, you can follow the arm of the Big Dipper as it arcs around toward the bright star called Arcturus. Roughly in the middle of that arc, you'll find the Northern Crown constellation, which looks a bit like a smiley face. Sometime between now and September, if you look to the left-hand side of the Northern Crown, what will look like a new star will shine for five days or so.

This star system is called T. Coronae Borealis, also known as the Blaze Star, and most of the time, it is way too dim to be visible to the naked eye. But once roughly every 80 years, a violent thermonuclear explosion makes it over 10,000 times brighter. The last time it happened was in 1946, so now it’s our turn to see it.

Neighborhood litterbug

“The T. Coronae Borealis is a binary system. It is actually two stars,” said Gerard Van Belle, the director of science at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. One of these stars is a white dwarf, an old star that has already been through its fusion-powered lifecycle. “It’s gone from being a main sequence star to being a giant star. And in the case of giant stars, what happens is their outer parts eventually get kind of pushed into outer space. What’s left behind is a leftover core of the star—that’s called a white dwarf,” Van Belle explained.

The white dwarf stage is normally a super peaceful retirement period for stars. The nuclear fusion reaction no longer takes place, which makes white dwarfs very dim. They are still pretty hot, though, and they're super dense, with a mass comparable to our Sun squeezed into a volume resembling the Earth.

But the retirement of the white dwarf in T. Coronae Borealis is hardly peaceful, as it has a neighbor prone to littering. “Its companion star is in the red giant phase, where it is puffed up. Its outer parts are getting sloughed off and pushed into space. The material that is coming off the red giant is now falling onto the white dwarf,” Van Belle said.

Ticking time bomb

And it doesn’t take much littering to make the white dwarf explode. “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.

“Predictions in astronomy come in two flavors. One is super precise—like the eclipse is going to pass over the city of Houston at exactly 11:35 pm. Other predictions are like this, when we say, ‘well, it’s going to explode sometime between May and September. Maybe a little outside of that window,’” said Van Belle.

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.

Even neater is that stellar explosions like this bring us way more than fireworks to see. They’ve made your iPhone possible.

The mother of all iPhones

Very energetic events like the T. Coronae Borealis explosion often take light elements like hydrogen and turn them into heavier ones. “This particular kind of object makes most of the lithium we have. Batteries in our phones and other things ultimately came from explosions like this specific one, a recurrent nova,” Van Belle told Ars. The Big Bang, according to Van Belle, formed a bit of lithium, but that didn’t survive till today. The material we have was made in nuclear reactions powering nova explosions.

Lithium and other heavier elements (heavier than hydrogen and helium, that is) are ejected into space by the likes of T. Coronae Borealis and ultimately end up in newly formed stars and the disks around them. “That is how lithium ends up in planets such as Earth,” said Van Belle. “This event is not going to call attention to itself by casting shadows on the ground,” he added. But at least we know when to expect it.

“When the Betelgeuse supergiant in the Orion constellation explodes, you’ll know it because it will be as bright as the full moon and it will be very hard to ignore. I can say with confidence that it will explode sometime between now and 100,000 years from now. That’s your typical astronomical prediction,” Van Belle said.