Look Up at Tonight's Dark Sky

Now is a great time to walk outside at night and look up at a dark sky. Here’s what I mean.

We humans are remarkable beings — with infinite spiritual potential, yet physically infinitesimal in our immense Universe. So, how do we balance both aspects of ourselves, especially when the culture feeds our gluttonous egos 24 by 7.

Well, I want to share a secret with you about how you can simultaneously experience your own expansiveness while at the same time feeling your insignificance and fragility to help you stay humble and grounded in your life. All we need to is shift the focus off ourselves for even a few minutes every night between now and September and look up to the Corona Boreales constellation. Corona Borealis is home to a binary star that is doing something right now that seems mind-bending. 

Transcript

Now is a great time to walk outside at night and look up at a dark sky. Here’s what I mean.

We humans are remarkable beings — with infinite spiritual potential, yet physically infinitesimal in our immense Universe. So, how do we balance both aspects of ourselves, especially when the culture feeds our gluttonous egos 24 by 7.

Well, I want to share a secret with you about how you can simultaneously experience your own expansiveness while at the same time feeling your insignificance and fragility to help you stay humble and grounded in your life. All we need to is shift the focus off ourselves for even a few minutes every night between now and September and look up to the Corona Boreales Constellation. Corona Borealis is home to a binary star that is doing something right now that seems mind-bending. I’m Joe Kornowski 

About 50% of all stars are known as binary stars — sometimes called binary star systems. They consisting two stars that are close enough to each other with strong enough gravitational fields that they are gravitationally connected and orbit each other.

One such binary star system exists in the Corona Boreales Constellation, and it consists of one very large dying star called a Red Giant and one very small and gravitationally dense “dead star” called a White Dwarf. It’s called a “dead star” because it has run out of fuel, the hydrogen gas it burned in thermonuclear fusion to produce heat and light. But it’s still plenty hot, very dense and exerts a strong gravitational force.  Together this binary star system is called T CrB.

It’s Red Giant is about 75 times the size of our sun. It’s gravitationally bound White Dwarf is about the size of Earth. And the distance between the Red Giant and the White Dwarf is about the same distance from our sun to a spot between Mercury and Venus.

The distance between that binary system and Earth is about 2600 light years — which is still in our Milky Way Galaxy!

The fascinating thing about T CRB is that it’s one of only about 5 or 10 recurring “NOVA” binary star systems. That means it essentially explodes periodically causing it to grow very large and become extremely bright very quickly — but only for a short time.

What causes the explosion is that the intense gravity of the white dwarf peels off hydrogen plasma from the Red Giant over the span of 80 years. At that point, the mass of the hydrogen gas around the white dwarf grows to about the same mass as the Earth.

When it reaches that Earth-size mass, the light of T Crb becomes quite dim, and that signals the critical mass of hydrogen around the white dwarf is getting ready to spontaneously ignite itself into a huge thermonuclear explosion, or eruption.

The last eruption was in 1946, and it was well-observed by astronomers and even with the naked eye by people who knew where to look. The one before that was in 1866, which also was fairly well observed. Before that was the eruption of 1787 and maybe even the one in 1271 observed by some German monks.

Now, T CrB is far enough away from us at 2600 light years, that it poses no danger to us on Earth.  All we see is what was a very faint binary star turn brilliant for a few days to a week before throwing off all of what was hydrogen that has been flash-fried to helium, before returning to its former size and brightness.

It you have a pair of binoculars or, even better, a small telescope, then you can actually watch this process unfold in your own backyard. In fact, a large group of night watchers — both professional and amateur astronomers are doing this everynight now until the eruption occurs. An organized group of over 1600 Citizen Astronomers are part of what’s called a Cosmic Catalysm Program sponsored by Unistellar, a maker of smart telescopes, in conjunction with the SETI Institute, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. And a good number of them have signed up to record observational readings of T Crb as it nears the dramatic end of its long-term recurrent nova episode.

Every night these citizen astronomers watch this nova “target,” T CrB, recording one or more observations, uploading them to the designated database and then notifying the Cosmic Cataclysm community on Slack.

The aggregated obervations track the progress of T CrB as it heads to an inevitable eruption sometime between now and September. The hope is to catch it at the moment it starts to erupt and brighten. 

With one of the newer class of smart telescopes, like the ones made by Unisteller, it’s easy to use a smartphone app to load the coordinates of T CrB into the telescope, hit a GO-TO button, then hit record, and finally tidy up your observation file before uploading it to the database from which professional astronomers update what’s called a “light curve” of T CrB’s eruption.

If you want to learn more, check out the SETI Institute video on YouTube with Dr. Tim Esposito, SETI’s lead astronomer for the Cosmic Cataclysm program.

If you want to see this for yourself — which I strongly encourage, then first, download one of the smartphone astronomy apps of the night sky. Two that I like are Stellarium and Night Sky. Both allow you to hold up your phone in realtime to see an overlay of all the astronomical objects — the moon, planets, constellations, and even Starlink satellites and spent rocket bodies still in orbit.

On the app, you want to look for two major constellations — Hercules and Bootes — and then a smaller constellation between them named Corona Borealis. That’s where the nova lives, and where you want to train your focus in the night sky.

The stars of Corona Borealis can be faint, but keep looking for it to get familiar the location. That way, when T CrB erupts, you will suddenly see a bright star where you saw nothing before. Of course, binoculars help. And I telescope is even better.

This nova eruption is much rarer and more spectacular in its own right than the total solar eclipse many of us observed back in April. Typically, every generation gets only one chance to watch this nova erupt.

For me, observing a rare astronomical event like this is part of a spiritual practice. It gets me out of my silly inane thoughts, and petty hurts, fears and anxieties — that mostly keep ME focused on ME — as I join a community of others who want to look out more than 2000 light years across the cosmos to see something mysterious and ineffable, on a scale none of us humans can really even fathom as we while away too much of our short life on our little ant hill looking at some meaningless text or TikTok videos.

So, instead of bowing our heads for many hours of the day to the tiny screen we carry around to stay distracted from the natural wonders of the real world …. STOP! Grab some binoculars or pick up a smart telescope and watch this 80-year cosmic dance of a Red Giant and its white dwarf partner, 2600 light years across our own galaxy as it spins up into the grand finale of an explosive thermonuclear climax, a nova!