Astronomers expect to happen an event in September when a once-in-a-lifetime nova explosion 3,000 light-years from Earth will light up our night sky.
T Coronae Borealis
T Coronae Borealis, also known as T CrB (pronounced tee-core-bore) or the “Blaze Star,” is on the precipice of a massive explosion.
T CrB is a binary star system some 3,000 light-years away that consists of a white dwarf and a red giant. It’s also a recurrent nova, which means the system explodes regularly.
For T CrB, this nova event happens roughly every 80 years — it’s a like Halley’s Comet event every 76 years — so, astronomers call T CrB a “recurrent” nova.
Nova explosion
A nova explosion is the dramatic instance of a star exploding as it interacts with another, nearby star.
T CrB binary system contains two stars — a white dwarf and a red giant.
The white dwarf is an incredibly dense remnant of a once larger star.
It’s about the size of planet Earth but with the same mass as our sun. Its neighbor, the red giant, is in its final years of existence and is slowly being stripped of hydrogen by the gravitational pull of the denser white dwarf.
A nova explosion is different from supernova explosion. Actually, Supernova is the final explosion that utterly destroys stars. In a nova event, the dwarf star remains intact, which is why nova events typically repeat themselves.
