How to see the 2024 nova explosion without a telescope

A nova explosion is the dramatic instance of a star exploding as it interacts with another, nearby star. It’s a one of many, repeated moments during the long, slow, death of two neighboring stars in the same system.Astronomers are waiting for the fiery explosion of T Coronae Borealis, also dubbed the “Blaze Star” and known to astronomers as “T CrB”.The system contains two stars — a white dwarf and a red giant. The white dwarf is an incredibly dense remnant of a once larger star. It’s about the size of planet Earth but with the same mass as our Sun.
Its neighbor, the red giant, is in its final years of existence and is slowly being stripped of hydrogen by the gravitational pull of the denser white dwarf.This star “cannibalism” causes a tremendous buildup of pressure and heat, which eventually triggers a huge thermonuclear explosion. The explosion doesn’t completely destroy the stars, however, and so this event repeats over time. It can carry on for hundreds of thousands of years.For T CrB, this nova event happens roughly every 80 years — it’s a like Halley’s Comet event every 76 years — so, astronomers call T CrB a “recurrent” nova.They believe T CrB’s prior eruptions were observed as long ago as December 1787 and even October 1217 AD. 

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