A 'once-in-a-lifetime' nova explosion is expected to be seen in the Tennessee night sky. Why it could happen 'any time now'
A nova explosion in the binary star system T Coronae Borealis is predicted to happen in May 2025, which people across the United States are expected to be able to see. Scientists first alerted the public about this celestial phenomenon in June 2024. After months of hearing the binary star system that could go nova "any day now," the explosion never came. But now is the time, according to NASA scientists.
And the view from the Earth is expected to be pretty spectacular.
The highly anticipated nova in the T Coronae Borealis system isn't exactly on a specific timeline. With the system being thousands of light years away, scientists believe that the light projected from the explosion will finally make its way to Earth in the next few months, according to NASA.
T Coronae Borealis can be seen in a horseshoe-shaped constellation called Corona Borealis, or the "Northern Crown".
NASA encourages sky watchers to practice finding the constellation Corona Borealis in the eastern part of the sky during the first half of the night between Hercules and Bootes, so that people can have a point of comparison when the T CrB nova appears.
You can also find it with the two brightest stars in the Northern Hemisphere – Arcturus and Vega. It should be between the two of those with the Big Dipper handle pointing the way, according to The Planetary Society.
In the T Coronae Borealis system, there is a red giant star with a smaller white dwarf star orbiting closely around it. The dwarf star is close enough to the puffed-up giant that the dwarf takes on some of the giant's hydrogens. When it accumulates enough, it explodes.
"About every 80 years, the white dwarf has accumulated so much of the other star's hydrogen, that it ignites a thermonuclear explosion. And that's the nova," read NASA's explanation of the phenomenon.
People across Tennessee should be able to see it with the naked eye once it happens.
Usually, T Coronae Borealis is very faint and people need a telescope to spot it in the night sky, but the explosion caused by the nova is expected to be so massive, spectators should be able to look up and see it with the naked eye.
Florida Today contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: A nova explosion may happen any time now. Will 'T CrB be seen in TN?
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
26 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Astronomers capture the birth of numerous planets outside our solar system
The observations offer a unique glimpse into the inner workings of an emerging planetary system, said the University of Chicago's Fred Ciesla, who was not involved in the study appearing in the journal Nature. Advertisement 'This is one of the things we've been waiting for. Astronomers have been thinking about how planetary systems form for a long period of time,' Ciesla said. 'There's a rich opportunity here.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up NASA's Webb Space Telescope and the European Southern Observatory in Chile teamed up to unveil these early nuggets of planetary formation around the young star known as HOPS-315. It's a yellow dwarf in the making like the sun, yet much younger at 100,000 to 200,000 years old and some 1,370 light-years away. A single light-year is 6 trillion miles. In a cosmic first, McClure and her team stared deep into the gas disk around the baby star and detected solid specks condensing — signs of early planet formation. A gap in the outer part of the disk allowed them to gaze inside, thanks to the way the star tilts toward Earth. Advertisement They detected silicon monoxide gas as well as crystalline silicate minerals, the ingredients for what's believed to be the first solid materials to form in our solar system more than 4.5 billion years ago. The action is unfolding in a location comparable to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, containing the leftover building blocks of our solar system's planets. The condensing of hot minerals was never detected before around other young stars, 'so we didn't know if it was a universal feature of planet formation or a weird feature of our solar system,' McClure wrote in an email. 'Our study shows that it could be a common process during the earliest stage of planet formation.' While other research has looked at younger gas disks and, more commonly, mature disks with potential planet wannabes, there has been no specific evidence for the start of planet formation until now, McClure said. In a stunning picture taken by the ESO's ALMA telescope network, the emerging planetary system resembles a lightning bug glowing against the black void. It's impossible to know how many planets might form around HOPS-315. With a gas disk as massive as the sun's might have been, it could also wind up with eight planets a million or more years from now, according to McClure. Purdue University's Merel van 't Hoff, a co-author, is eager to find more budding planetary systems. By casting a wider net, astronomers can look for similarities and determine which processes might be crucial to forming Earth-like worlds. 'Are there Earth-like planets out there, or are we ... so special that we might not expect it to occur very often?' Advertisement
Gizmodo
26 minutes ago
- Gizmodo
7 Weird Sci-Fi Network TV Shows That Aired Just as Streaming Was Taking Over
Netflix's first original series, House of Cards, launched in 2013, and television was never the same. But even as Netflix and other platforms began to gain popularity, old-school network and basic cable channels continued to create edgy (and sometimes a bit unhinged) genre shows—the sort of programming that just a few years later would come to dominate the streaming landscape. With that in mind, here are seven weird and wonderful sci-fi shows from the last era of TV before streaming well and truly took over. M. Night Shyamalan directed the pilot episode and served as executive producer on this adaptation of author Blake Crouch's sci-fi mystery trilogy. Wayward Pines starts off as a sort of Twin Peaks riff—a federal agent (Matt Dillon) stumbles his way into a small town full of secretive people while looking for his missing partner. Then comes the twist: it's actually the 41st century, and everyone in the town is there because they were placed in cryosleep ahead of the apocalypse. In the intervening thousands of years, mutated humans took over the planet, and the barrier between 21st-century people and far-future 'Abbies' (short for 'aberrations') is weakening by the day. Along the way, the show digs into some classic sci-fi questions, including 'Who are the real monsters?' Wayward Pines—whose cast included Carla Gugino, Toby Jones, Juliette Lewis, Melissa Leo, and Djimon Hounsou—ran for two seasons. Shyamalan's next TV venture was Servant at Apple TV+, the same streamer hosting Crouch's current project, an adaptation of his book Dark Matter. But you can still visit the roaring 4020s: Wayward Pines is streaming on Hulu; it also got a physical release. For three seasons, viewers followed along as a ragtag group of reluctant heroes—a zoologist (James Wolk), a journalist (Kristen Connelly), a safari guide (Nonso Anozie), a French intelligence agent (Nora Arnezeder), and a veterinary pathologist (Billy Burke)—navigated a world where every 'when animals attack' worst-case scenario suddenly happens at once. From the start, there are conspiracies to investigate—a sinister biotech company looks awfully culpable, and you know there are going to be cover-ups galore—and a lot of Zoo, based on the James Patterson best-seller, featured its main characters zipping around from place to place looking for clues, guilty parties, and ways to fight back, including maybe even a cure. Along the way, the show made plenty of room for crazed animals to do their thing (bears, birds, exotic escapees), eventually ushering in hybrid crazed animals, making Zoo even more unhinged than was originally promised. Zoo also incorporated humans among its horrifying mutations, in case you couldn't get enough of that on Wayward Pines. You can buy all three seasons of Zoo through Amazon Prime; the show also got a physical release. The 2011 film starring Bradley Cooper spawned this short-lived but entertaining sci-fi series starring Jake McDornan, who What We Do in the Shadows fans will now recognize as Nadja's hapless fling Gregor (aka Jeff). It ran for just one season, but in old-school network terms, that meant a whopping 22 episodes. McDornan plays an average-dude writer whose life is transformed when he takes a drug that makes him the smartest person in the world—but the genius comes with a time limit as well as dangerous side effects. It also puts him on the FBI's radar, and though he uses his powers for good instead of evil, the wonder pill brings out the worst in an awful lot of people in his orbit. Craig Sweeny, who also worked on Sherlock Holmes riffs Elementary and Watson, was the showrunner, and the supporting cast included Dexter's Jennifer Carpenter and The Abyss' Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, with Cooper stopping by to reprise his character from the film—who's now a senator with a secret. You can stream Limitless on Paramount+; it also got a physical release. io9 became so obsessed with Under the Dome—inspired by the Stephen King novel, and developed by famed comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, Saga)—that for a time we even featured recaps written by the Dome itself. Whether or not that was a complimentary obsession as time wore on is perhaps debatable, but you can't deny the delights of watching a show that makes you go 'Wait… what?' multiple times over the course of an episode. The premise: a small town suddenly finds itself encased in a dome. Where did it come from? What is its purpose? And how will they be able to survive trapped together under there? Also, aliens. Under the Dome had a huge cast (Rachelle Lefevre, Natalie Martinez, Jeff Fahey, Dean Norris, Britt Robertson), and even if it fell off a little as it got into its third and final season, it still counted both King and Stephen Spielberg among its executive producers, and it managed to find its way to a satisfying ending. Even the cranky Dome can't argue with that. The Event, or THE EVƎNT as it preferred to style itself, starred the always likable Jason Ritter as a guy whose girlfriend goes missing on a Caribbean cruise—leading him into bonkers events that involve an alien conspiracy dating back decades and an assassination plot against the U.S. president (played by Longlegs' Blair Underwood). ER's Laura Innes co-starred as one of the extraterrestrial leaders. With elements of a political thriller enmeshed in all the sci-fi plotting, The Event also leaned into social media in a way was innovative at the time, giving characters Twitter accounts (back when it was still Twitter) and giving one a blog to provide clues to the show's central mystery… which never quite got solved. It was cancelled after just one season, but again—that was 22 episodes, making it beefier than most streaming series today. You can watch The Event free with ads on the Roku Channel; it also got both DVD and Blu-ray physical releases. Before Star Trek: Discovery or The White Lotus, but after Event Horizon and the Harry Potter movies, Jason Isaacs starred in this police procedural that actually streamed its pilot on Hulu ahead of the show's rollout on NBC. In Awake, he plays an LAPD detective whose existence fractures into two realities after a terrible car accident. In one, his wife survived, but his son died; in the other, it's reversed. Which is real? He doesn't know, and neither does the audience, though Awake helpfully kept the two lives straight by filming one in warm tones and the other with a cool hue. Even so, it's not a smooth co-existence for the character as he ping-pongs between realities while still working cases. Though the high-concept series was met with positive reviews, it didn't catch on with viewers and was cancelled before the first season aired its ambiguous final entry. It's available to rent or buy through Prime Video. J.J. Abrams was among the producers of this action-packed series created by J.H. Wyman, who'd worked on cult-beloved Abrams co-creation Fringe. (Abrams also composed Almost Human's theme music). Set in 2048, Almost Human imagined a near future where technology has evolved so rapidly that it's caused crime to spike to dangerous new levels. The only solution for law enforcement, naturally, is to pair human cops with highly advanced androids. There's no choice in this arrangement, which of course infuriates the human officer (Karl Urban) who blames robotkind for the death of a fellow human cop, not to mention his own leg and head injuries. But of course, over time, he develops a rapport with his new partner (Michael Ealy), an older model that's capable of almost human (ahem) emotions, rather than the more calculating, coldly mechanical newer versions. There's a Murderbot element, for sure, but with more running around urban dystopias solving brutal crimes. Despite a cool premise and a cool cast (Lili Taylor played the police captain), not to mention decent ratings, the show's hefty budget appears to have been its undoing. You can see what the future of TV looked like over a decade ago by streaming Almost Human's single season on AMC+; it's also available as a physical release. What sci-fi shows that aired on a major network in ye olde mid-2010s do you think of fondly? Share your favorites in the comments below! Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Yahoo
40 minutes ago
- Yahoo
If aliens existed on Mars 3.7 billion years ago, they would have needed umbrellas
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Mars was a rainier, wetter place than planetary scientists previously thought, according to a new study of ancient, inverted river channels that span more than 9,000 miles (14,484 kilometers) in the Red Planet's southern Noachis Terra region. "Our work is a new piece of evidence that suggests that Mars was once a much more complex and active planet than it is now, which is such an exciting thing to be involved in," study leader Adam Losekoot of the U.K.'s Open University said in a statement. We've known Mars was once a wet planet ever since the Mariner 9 orbiter mission from the '70s photographed a surface covered in dried-up river channels. These channels were dated back to over 3.5 billion years ago. However, channels cut into the ground are not the only evidence for running water on Mars. When that water ran-off, or evaporated, it left sedimentary deposits. Sometimes we see these in craters that were once lakes filled with water: NASA's Curiosity rover is exploring Gale Crater, which has a central three-mile-tall (five-kilometer-tall) peak covered in sediment. Other times, these sediments were laid down on river beds. Over the eons, the sediments would have hardened, while the river channels and the land around them would have weathered and eroded away. That left the sediments, which are more resistant to erosion, sticking out as tall ridges. Geologists today call them fluvial sinuous ridges, or, more plainly, inverted channels. Now, Losekoot, who is a Ph.D. student, has led the discovery of a vast network of these channels in Noachis Terra based on images and data taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera and the Context Camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) on the defunct Mars Global Surveyor mission. Previously, Noachis Terra had not been given due attention because it lacked the more classical river channels that form more obvious evidence of water. However, by mapping the network of inverted channels, Losekoot realized there was lots of evidence there had once been plentiful water in the region. "Studying Mars, particularly an under-explored region like Noachis Terra, is really exciting because it's an environment which has been largely unchanged for billions of years," said Losekoot. "It's a time capsule that records fundamental geological processes in a way that just isn't possible here on Earth." Some of the inverted channels appear as isolated segments that have survived the elements for billions of years. Others are more intact, forming systems that run for hundreds of miles and stand tens of yards tall. Such a widespread network of inverted channels does not suggest these channels were caused by flash floods, argues Losekoot. Rather, they seem to have formed in stable climatic conditions over a geologically significant period of time during the Noachian–Hesperian transition, which was the shift from one geological era into the next around 3.7 billion years ago. What's particularly intriguing is the most likely source of water to have formed these inverted channels is precipitation — be it rain, hail or snow. Indeed, given the size of the inverted channel network in Noachis Terra, this region of Mars may have experienced lots of rainy days in a warm and wet climate. RELATED STORIES — Carbon dioxide rivers? Ancient Mars liquid may not all have been water — Good news for life: Mars rivers flowed for long stretches long ago — Mars Had Big Rivers for Billions of Years It's more evidence that Mars was once more like Earth than the cold and barren desert it is today. Losekoot presented his findings at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting held at the University of Durham in the U.K., which ran between July 7 and July 11. Solve the daily Crossword
