Ever see a star explode? You’re about to get a chance very soon

Every clear night for the past three weeks, Bob Stevens has aimed his home telescope at the same two stars in an attempt to witness one of the most violent events in the universe, a nova explosion 100,000 times more bright than the sun.

Scientists say the eruption, which could happen at any time, has attracted the attention of major astronomical observatories around the world and is expected to advance understanding of the turbulent binary system.

But even with all the high-tech observing power that NASA and other scientific agencies can muster, astrophysicists rely on countless amateur astronomers like Stevens to spot the explosions first.

The reason? It’s too costly to keep equipment focused on the same target for months at a time.

“You think everyone’s watching it happen, but it’s not going to happen if you just sit back and watch,” said Tom Meneghini, telescope operations manager and director emeritus at Mount Wilson Observatory. “It’s like a cauldron being watched,” he joked.

The star is so far away that it takes 3,000 years for its light to reach us, meaning the explosion occurred before the last pyramids of Egypt were built. The star will be visible as bright as the North Star for a few days before fading into darkness.

If discovered, it will be observed by some of the most cutting-edge observatories on Earth and in space, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

“A lot of people are waiting to find the new jewel in the crown,” said Mansi Kasliwal, an astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology, who will observe the event from Palomar Observatory in northeastern San Diego County. The nova will explode in the constellation Corona Nord.

Also known as the Fiery Star, T Corona is actually made up of two stars: a hot, dense white dwarf and a cooler red giant.

of DwarfIt ran out of fuel long ago and collapsed to roughly the size of Earth, but it continues to suck up hydrogen gas from its larger neighbor for the duration of a human lifetime or so.

This stolen gas is building up in a disk around the dwarf planet, like a hot, messy version of Saturn’s rings. Soon the disk will become so massive, violent and intractable that it will inevitably explode like a thermonuclear bomb.

But neither star is destroyed, and the process repeats roughly every 80 years.

This time, dedicated fans like Stevens are ready to sound the alarm when the star goes nova.

More than just hobbyists, many amateur observers are publishing their own scientific research, including Stevens, who built his own observatory at his home in Rancho Cucamonga.

“The city thinks it’s a sunroom,” says Stevens. After the inspector stopped by, he removed the screws holding the roof in place and removed it to reveal a clear sky through a telescope.

Each night, he turns on the telescope for an hour or more to collect data, which he then posts to an online community of amateur astronomers who monitor the stars nearly nonstop.

Large observatories can’t provide this kind of constant monitoring: Hundreds of scientists compete for time to observe different celestial objects each night. For them, keeping these telescopes glued to the Blaze Star would be a waste of precious observing time.

There are many speculations about when the nova will occur, but most astrophysicists agree that it will happen before the end of the year, possibly by the end of August.

There are several warning systems in place to alert amateurs and professionals if an explosion occurs, and some observatories have programmed their telescopes to automatically abort their current observing schedule and focus on the star when they receive a notification, Stevens said.

Major observatories face another problem: Many of their telescopes are designed to observe the faintest, faintest objects, but Blaze Star’s nova is far from faint. Pointing those telescopes at the nova would overload their sensors, resulting in washed-out, overexposed photos.

That’s why Palomar Observatory, a Caltech research facility in north San Diego County, doesn’t use the iconic 16-foot-wide Hale telescope beneath its giant white dome. Instead, it uses a much smaller telescope called the Gattini IR, housed in an unassuming little brick building about a quarter of a mile back down the road.

When the nova occurred, the Gattini IR would observe Blaze Star every few hours instead of every few nights.

Scientists say there’s still a lot to learn about novae: For example, physicists still don’t know why some novae erupt every decade while others don’t, perhaps for thousands of years.

Some researchers believe that novae like Blaze Star could be precursors to supernovae. These explosions, billions of times more luminous than the Sun, destroy stars and often leave behind black holes. Supernovae are also a useful tool for astronomers to measure distances.

But studying similar events is already producing discoveries.

Recently, scientists have found that novae tend to fling material into space at faster speeds than would be predicted based on the strength of the explosion.

“We want to understand the physics of novae, so if we have a nova as close as T Corona Borealis, we hope that it will be well studied by all the telescopes and we’ll get a very complete picture,” said Caltech’s Kasliwal.

Part of that understanding will likely be due to amateur astronomers.

Rapid advances in telescopes have given amateurs access to techniques that professionals didn’t have 20 years ago, let alone 80, said Forrest Sims, an amateur astronomer from Apache Junction, Arizona, who observes the star on every clear night.

And amateurs can achieve better coverage than larger telescopes because “we usually have full control over when and where we point it.” [our telescopes]”Experts might have to apply for grants to observe for 30 minutes or two hours with a large telescope,” Sims said.

This allows for a huge amount of data to be collected, and with hundreds of community observers around the world, Blaze Star can be observed almost continuously. Many people, including Sims and Stevens, post their data on the American Society of Variable Star Observers’ website, making it available to everyone.

Stevens remembers reading a paper by an expert who had observed five asteroids over a two-year period — “I thought we could do this in a month,” Stevens says — and then published a paper summarizing the results of 10 observations.

One professor was so astonished by the numbers Stevens was seeing that she agreed to fly to an asteroid conference in Puerto Rico just to meet him, and the two ended up collaborating: Stevens had the telescope and she had the contacts in the field.

today, Amateur Astronomer“The work has become so sophisticated that many in the field have a hard time calling them amateurs.

“We call ourselves ‘small’ telescope “It sounds more fun than ‘scientist,’ and in some ways experts will admit, even grudgingly, that the work we do is often at a professional level,” Sims said.

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