If you’ve ever wanted to look to the sky and watch a star explode you’re in luck. T Coronae Borealis is a binary star system around 3,000 light-years away, and it will be visible to us here on Earth. You won’t even need special equipment to watch it happen—though it would help tremendously.
T Coronae Borealis, which also goes by the supercool nickname the “Blaze Star,” will be visibly exploding yet again. That’s right, again, because it explodes all the time, cosmically speaking.
The last time it blew up was around 80 years ago and it looks like it’s going to happen again this week. It does that because it’s what’s called a recurrent nova, which is a star that explodes over and over again.
It’s scheduled to erupt once again on Thursday, March 27, according to calculations by astronomer Jean Schneider.
A Once-in-a-Lifetime Star Explosion May Happen This Week—How to See It
Seems like a very specific date. How did Schneider of the Paris Observatory reach that conclusion when, before he narrowed it down to a specific day, it was more of a specific window that opened in February 2024 and had no defined closing date?
Schneider analyzed the star system’s orbital mechanics and found that nova eruptions occur in sync with the stars’ orbits around each other—every 128 orbits, to be exact. Each orbit takes around 227 days. Based on this pattern, March 27 seems like the perfect time for Blaze Star to go off.
If it doesn’t happen on March 27th, look to the skies again on November 10, 2025, when it will definitely happen. But if it still doesn’t happen, then look to the skies again on June 25, 2026, when it will definitely definitely happen. Maybe. Look. You can only be so precise when you’re observing an explosion that happened about 3,000 years ago about 3,000 light-years away.
T CrB, or Blaze Star to its homies, is a binary star system that consists of a white dwarf and a red giant star. The white dwarf is a remnant of a dead star with a powerful gravitational pull on its red giant friend. The red giant is shedding material which is creating this Saturn-like disk of dust and gas around the white dwarf that builds up heat and pressure that pops off spectacularly every once in a while, rocketing debris off into space.
The explosion doesn’t destroy the star like a supernova explosion would. Instead, the white dwarf survives and the nova soon fades, only to build back up to another spectacular explosion decades from now.
As for what it will look like from Earth should it happen on March 27, November 10, or June 25, it’ll look like a brand-new bright and shining star in the sky that will be visible at the lower tip of the Corona Borealis constellation.
Any constellation heads out there would know that Corona Borealis is sandwiched between the Hercules constellation and the Bootes constellation.
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