T Coronae Borealis star ready to release massive thermonuclear explosion

A massive thermonuclear explosion with a power “unimaginable to human beings” is about to go off in space and the violence will produce a burning light in the night sky visible to the naked eye.

The blast will come from the T Coronae Borealis binary star system, made up of an ageing red giant star and an Earth-sized white dwarf star orbiting around each other, and it could happen sometime between now and the end of 2024.

The violent burst results from the red giant depositing hydrogen onto the surface of the white dwarf, which builds up as an ocean of hydrogen and then fuses and explodes.

“It’s actually really a bomb,” University of Queensland physicist Benjamin Pope told NewsWire.

“It’s a layer of material that is ready to go off like a bomb.”

The force will be “phenomenally larger” than the thermonuclear bombs developed by human beings.

“If one of these events happened in our solar system, we would be done for,” Dr Pope said.

“The good thing is this is extraordinarily far away.”

T Coronae Borealis is located within the Northern Crown Corona Borealis curve of stars about 3000 light-years away from Earth.

After the explosion, the star will burn brightly in the night for about a week and Australians in the northern half of the continent will be able to see it.

The Northern Crown was a horseshoe-shaped curve of stars west of the Hercules constellation, NASA said.

It can be identified by locating the two brightest stars in the northern hemisphere – Arcturus and Vega – and then tracking a straight line from one to the other that will lead skywatchers to Hercules and the Corona Borealis.

“It will be as bright as the other stars you might be familiar with,” Dr Pope said.

The event is called a “recurrent novae”, with the hydrogen build-up and explosion happening every 80 years.

“It is probably one of the only examples of a novae that any of us will see in our lifetimes,” Dr Pope said.

“The sky and the stars are not eternal and unchanging but actually very dynamic. All this violent universe around us.

“It’s not close in the way the corner shops are but it’s close in a cosmic sense.”

A nova was different from a supernova, which is a final, titanic explosion that destroys some dying stars, Dr Rebekah Hounsell, an assistant research scientist with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, said.

In a nova event, the dwarf star remains intact, sending the accumulated material hurtling into space in a blinding flash.

The cycle typically repeats itself over time, a process that can carry on for hundreds of thousands of years.

“There are a few recurrent novae with very short cycles, but typically we don’t often see a repeated outburst in a human lifetime and rarely one so relatively close to our own system,” she said.

“It’s incredibly exciting to have this front-row seat.”

According to NASA, the first recorded sighting of the T CrB nova was more than 800 years ago, in autumn 1217, when a man named Abbot Burchard, of Ursberg, Germany, noted his observance of “a faint star that for a time shone with great light”.