Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Ooh, Kaboom

If you live in the northern hemisphere and own a telescope, you might want to get out and look at these coordinates as soon as you can:

Right ascension 23 24 47.73, declination +61 11 14.8 - not far from the Cassiopeia star Caph, and an even shorter distance from B-type star HIP 115566. 

If you're lucky, you will see a star that wasn't there before...a classical nova which probably came from CzeV3217 (we won't be sure until it dies down). Classical novas are massive stellar flares that come from white dwarfs that are in close binary with a main-sequence companion. They're caused by the white dwarf stealing hydrogen from its buddy.

Pretty cool, right?

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