Stony Brook University
7:30 pm
ESS Building, Room 001
Friday, October 04, 2024
What's the Big Deal with T Corona Borealis?
Prof. Frederick Walter
In the Spring of 2024 the news was awash with 2 astronomical predictions: there would be a total eclipse of the Sun on April 8, and the star T Corona Borealis (T Cor Bor) would explode. The eclipse happened on time; we are still waiting on T CrB. T CrB is an example of a recurrent nova, one of only 10 confirmed such systems in our Galaxy. It is a binary star system consisting of a cool M-type giant star and a hot white dwarf. The M giant is constantly losing mass, some of which accumulates on the surface of the white dwarf star. About every 80 years the accumulated hydrogen ignites in a thermo-nuclear explosion that for a few days increases the brightness of the system by a few thousand times, making it a naked-eye star (second magnitude). The nova has been recorded in outburst 4 times, most recently in 1946. Its photometric behavior over the past year closely mimics what it did in the year prior to the 1946 outburst, so observers everywhere are eagerly anticipating its next explosion. I shall describe the novae, with emphasis on the history of T CrB, and discuss what we hope to learn by watching the onset of the thermo-nuclear detonation.
Prof. Walter, a resident of East Setauket, studies star birth, stellar weather, and star death using the Chandra and XMM-Newton X-ray observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), and telescopes in Arizona, Hawaii and Chile. He has been a Professor of Astronomy at Stony Brook since 1989.
