Tech Desk 
Oct 01, 2024
Astronomers around the world prepare for the rarest of rare as T Coronae Borealis, a recurrent nova, is gearing up to flare up in the Corona Borealis constellation 3,000 light years from Earth.
This spectacular explosion, visible to the naked eye, would briefly outshine Polaris, the North Star.
T Coronae Borealis
T Coronae Borealis is a white dwarf which had its last explosion in 1946 and is again presently on the brink of producing another explosive outburst. Astronomers are beginning to detect a characteristic brightness dip precursor to the nova's eruption.
NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope is scanning T Coronae Borealis daily, waiting for the gamma-ray spike that would signal the nova's eruption.
Read more: Solar Eclipse October 2024 — Pakistan to miss out on rare ‘ring of fire’ event
From the T Coronae Borealis explosion, astronomers can find information about how hot material gets at eruption, how fast material blows away from a white dwarf, and shock wave behaviour.
When to view T Coronae Borealis
A fleet of ground- and space-based telescopes, including the James Webb Space Telescope, Swift, INTEGRAL space telescopes and the Very Large Array in New Mexico would be recording the nova emission in unprecedented detail from the various wavelengths.
Thus it would be briefly visible to the naked eye, for the first few days, then to gamma- and x-ray telescopes, and radio telescopes for years to come.
Astronomers would study the aftermath of the explosion to determine how the outbursts spread and interact with the red giant companion star and in what ways their decay patterns vary.
