It is a spectacle that happens approximately every 80 years.
NASA announced that a rare burst of light from a dead star will be visible from Earth, in what scientists have called “a once-in-a-lifetime event.”
According to the US space agency, between June and September, an event known as a nova will manifest in the Corona Borealis, or Northern Crown, a constellation of the Milky Way.
It 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 very difficult to predict exactly when it will happen.
“It is a unique event that is about to occur, an imminent nova. It will be so bright that it can be seen from Earth with the naked eye,” NASA reported through its official website.
The stars that will cause this phenomenon are a white dwarf and a red giant, known together as T Coronae Borealis or the “Titan Star”, a binary system located approximately 3,000 light years from Earth.
Rebekah Hounsell, a research assistant at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a specialist in nova events, said that the stellar event “will create many new astronomers, offering young people a cosmic event that they can observe for themselves, make their own questions and collect their own data.
The last time this nova was observed was in 1946, according to what NASA published on its website. Hounsell explained that “there are some recurring novae with very short cycles, but we generally don’t see a repeated outburst in a human lifetime, and rarely one so relatively close to our system.”
