lThe American agency has made a somewhat unusual announcement but it is going to be one of the events this summer for astronomy fans. If in our country they are the tears of San Lorenzo, the popular showers of shooting stars in mid-Augustthe ones that make us look at the sky on summer nightsNASA wanted to give us the long teeth and has made a communication in which this summer we are going to having to be very aware of the sky.
What he has announced is that an intergalactic phenomenon that rarely occurs is going to occur, a nova. That is, an explosion that occurs due to the interaction between two stars and that on Earth we can see it as a small burst of light at a point in the night sky. Although it is NASA, it is very difficult to predict a specific date on which the event will occur, but it has been indicated that the date will be between the months of June and September of this year, which in terms of spatial time is as if we were talking about seconds or minutes of our ‘real’ time.
Something that happens once every 100 years
It will be a unique moment for the current inhabitants of our planet since the last time it occurred was in 1946. This phenomenon is caused by a star called a white dwarf and a red giant that, Together, they are called T Coronae Borealiswhich also has a much more common name which is Burning Star.
Rebekah Hounsell, research assistant at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and specialist in nova events, indicated that what is going to happen in the coming weeks is “a once-in-a-lifetime event that will create many new astronomersoffering young people a cosmic event they can observe for themselves, ask their own questions and collect their own data.”
But the important thing for terrestrial inhabitants is to know how to decipher this event in the sky in order to see it. To do this, you must identify two stars that shine very brightly in the northern hemisphere, Arcturus and Vega, and follow a straight line from one to the other. Right in the middle are Hercules and the Boreal Crown. At that point you will be able to see an eruption that will be available to the human eye for only a week. “There are few recurrent novae with short cycles, it is normally not possible to see a repeated burst in a human lifetime, and it is even rarer to witness one so relatively close to our own system,” concluded the NASA expert.
