You may recall back in April that I told you about a “new” star that astronomers predicted would appear in the sky.
It was all the rage throughout the media, as the constellation Corona Borealis (the northern crown) graced the eastern sky of spring.
If any of you have been watching that constellation patiently waiting for it to appear … well, you’re not the only ones who are disappointed.
We astronomers are also sitting on the edge of our seats in anticipation.
The star is known as T Corona Borealis — aka the “Blaze Star.” When it erupts it will change the appearance of this constellation for a few days.
Such a new star appearing out of nowhere is not common, of course, but it does happen occasionally.
Ancient skywatchers called such a phenomenon a “nova” — a word that comes from the Latin “novus,” meaning “new.”
Today, however, we know a nova is the result of a pair of stars orbiting one another.
One pulls hydrogen onto itself from the other, and when this accumulates, its surface heats up and triggers a thermonuclear explosion that will appear to add another star to the sky for a few days.
Nova T CrB (the CrB refers to the constellation name) is what is known as a recurrent nova, a star that can explode more than once during its lifetime.
Its eruptions have been documented as far back as October 1217, and its last appearances came in 1866 and 1946.
From history, astronomers figure that it erupts on average about every 80 years.
So when it was reported that this star could show up sometime this year, I admit was a bit puzzled — not for some esoteric astrophysical reason but because of what I learned in first grade: arithmetic.
You see, adding 80 to 1946 gives us 2026, not 2024. And I’ll bet some of my readers wondered that, too.
So what happened? Why was Nova T CrB predicted to burst into the sky sometime this year, and why hasn’t it?
The reason it was expected to erupt sometime this year is that before the 1946 eruption, the star appeared to become fainter for a while, and that’s exactly what has been happening to it over the past few years.
So 2024 seemed like a reasonable guess, but we just don’t know enough about these phenomena to make accurate forecasts.
Don’t lose hope, though. 2024 is far from over, and the star could still erupt.
Our problem now is that Corona Borealis, which in the springtime was just appearing in the east at dusk, is now receding from view in the west.
By the month’s end, it’ll become lost in the glare of the setting sun and won’t appear again until late November, when we’ll see it low in the eastern sky at dawn.
So now we wait. But the question remains: Will Nova T CrB brighten this year or next year? Or will it do so in 2026 as my first-grade teacher might have argued?
Only time will tell, but astronomers are watching closely because whatever happens will teach us something very important about the cosmos.
