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Every clear night for the past three weeks, Bob Stevens has pointed his home telescope at the same two stars in hopes of witnessing one of the most violent events in the universe—the explosion of a nova a hundred thousand times brighter than the sun.

The eruption, which scientists say could happen any day, has piqued the interest of major observatories around the world and promises to improve our understanding of turbulent binary star systems.

Yet for all the high-tech observational power that NASA and other scientific institutions can muster, astrophysicists rely on countless amateur astronomers like Stevens to spot the explosion first.

The reason? It’s just too expensive for their equipment to focus on the same subject for months on end.

“I think everybody’s going to be watching it happen, but if you’re sitting there just watching it, it’s not going to happen,” said Tom Meneghini, director of telescope operations and executive director emeritus at the Mount Wilson Observatory. “It’s like watching Manja,” he joked.

The star is so far away that it takes 3,000 years for its light to reach Earth, meaning the explosion occurred before the last of the Egyptian pyramids was built. It will appear as bright as the North Star for just a few days before fading into darkness.

Once sighted, some of the most advanced observatories on Earth and in space will join in the observation, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

“A lot of people are looking forward to seeing the new crown jewel,” said Mansi Casliwal, a Caltech astronomy professor who plans to use the Palomar Observatory in northeast San Diego County to observe the event. The nova will erupt in the constellation Corona Borealis (Northern Corona).

T Coronae Borealis, also called the Blazing Star, is actually two stars – a hot, dense white dwarf and a cooler red giant.

The dwarf star, which has long since run out of fuel and collapsed to about the size of Earth, siphons hydrogen gas from its larger neighbor over the course of about a human lifetime.

This gas has accumulated in a disk around the dwarf as a hot, messy version of Saturn’s rings. Soon the disk will become so heavy that it will become violent and unwieldy and will inevitably explode like a thermonuclear bomb.

However, no star is destroyed and the process repeats approximately every 80 years.

This time, there’s an army of enthusiasts like Stevens ready to sound the alarm when the star turns new.

Far from being mere hobbyists, a number of these amateur observers have published their own scientific studies. Stevens even built his own observatory as an addition to his house in Rancho Cucamonga.

“The city thinks it’s a sunroom,” Stevens said. After the surveyor stopped, he removed the screws securing the roof, allowing him to roll it down to reveal the clear sky in front of his telescope.

Every night, he turns on the telescope and spends more than an hour collecting data, which he later posts to an online community of amateur astronomers who observe the star almost non-stop.

Large observatories simply cannot maintain such constant monitoring. Hundreds of scientists compete for time to look at a wide range of astronomical targets each night. For them, keeping those telescopes glued to the Blaze Star is a waste of valuable observing time.

Estimates of when the nova will appear vary, but most astrophysicists agree that it will happen before the end of the year and probably by the end of August.

Once it erupts, there are several warning systems set up to notify amateurs and professionals alike. Some observatories have even programmed their telescopes to autonomously abandon their current observing plan and look at the star when the notification comes, Stevens said.

Large observatories also face another complication. Many of their telescopes are designed to look at the faintest and darkest targets, but the Blaze Star nova will be anything but faint. Pointing those telescopes at the new one would overwhelm the sensors, resulting in a blurry, overexposed picture.

That’s why Palomar Observatory, Caltech’s research station in north San Diego County, doesn’t use its iconic 16-foot-wide Hale telescope under its massive white dome. Instead, he uses a much smaller telescope called the Gattini-IR, located in a small, unsuspecting brick building about a quarter of a mile down the road.

Once the new one occurs, Gattini-IR will go from observing the Blaze Star every two nights to every few hours.

Scientists say they still have a lot to learn about the new ones. For example, physicists still aren’t sure why some erupt every decade while others probably don’t for millennia.

Some researchers suspect that novae like the Blaze Star may be precursors to supernovae. These explosions – billions of times brighter than the sun – destroy the star, often leaving behind a black hole. Supernovae are also a useful tool for astronomers to measure distance.

However, the study of such events has already led to discoveries.

Scientists have recently found that novae tend to eject material into space at faster rates than what would be predicted based on the intensity of the explosion.

“We want to understand the physics of novae, so by having a nova that is so close to T Coronae Borealis, which will hopefully be very well studied by all the telescopes … we can get a very complete picture,” Caltech’s Professor Caslival said .

Part of this understanding will be due in part to amateur astronomers.

Thanks to the rapid development of telescopes, amateurs are working with technology that professionals didn’t have just 20 years ago, let alone 80, said Forrest Sims, an amateur astronomer in Apache Junction, Arizona, who also observes the star every clear night.

And amateurs can achieve better coverage than large telescopes because “we usually have complete control over when and where we can aim [our telescopes]” Sims said. “A professional might have to write a grant to get half or two hours of time at a large telescope.”

This allows them to collect a lot of data. And with hundreds in the community watching from around the world, they can achieve near-continuous coverage of Blaze Star. Many, including Sims and Stephens, published their data in the American Assn. on the Variable Star Observers website, allowing anyone to use the data.

Stevens remembers reading a journal article by a professional who was able to observe five asteroids over two years. “I thought I could do it in a month,” Stevens said. He went on to publish a paper with 10 observations.

One professor was so shocked by the number Stevens was able to see that she reached out and agreed to fly to Puerto Rico for an asteroid conference just to meet him. Eventually they began working together—Stevens had the telescopes; she had connections in the district.

Today, the work of amateur astronomers has become so complex that many in their field find it difficult to call them amateurs.

“We call ourselves ‘small telescope scientists,'” Sims said. “It sounds more fun, and in some ways professionals will – and even begrudgingly – admit that the work we do is often professional-caliber.”

2024 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.