For the past three weeks, Bob Stephens has trained his telescope on the same two stars every clear night in the hope of witnessing one of the most violent events in the universe: a nova explosion 100,000 times brighter than the Sun.
The outburst, which scientists say could happen at any moment, has attracted interest from major observatories around the world and promises to expand our knowledge of turbulent binary star systems.
But despite all the advanced observing power that NASA and other scientific institutions can muster, astrophysicists rely on scores of amateur astronomers like Stephens to be the first to spot the explosion.
The reason? It’s simply too expensive to keep their equipment focused on the same subject for months on end.
“I think everyone will be watching it while it’s happening, but just sitting there watching it isn’t going to make it happen,” said Tom Meneghini, director of telescope operations and executive director emeritus at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. “It’s like a pot that’s being watched,” he joked.
Read more: A star is about to explode. Here’s how to watch it
The star is so far away that it will take 3,000 years for its light to reach Earth, meaning the explosion happened before the last Egyptian pyramids were built. It will appear about as bright as the North Star for just a few days before disappearing into darkness.
Once discovered, 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 anxiously waiting to spot the new jewel in the crown,” said Mansi Kasliwal, the Caltech astronomy professor who plans to use the Palomar Observatory in northeastern San Diego County to watch the event. The nova will burst in the constellation Corona Borealis, or Northern Crown.
T Coronae Borealis, also known as the Blaze 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, has been sucking up hydrogen gas from its larger neighbor for about a human lifetime.
This stolen gas has gathered into a disk around the dwarf, like a hot, messy version of Saturn’s rings. Soon the disk will become so massive that it will become violent and unruly, and will inevitably explode like a thermonuclear bomb.
However, neither star is destroyed and the process repeats itself approximately every 80 years.
This time, there’s an army of enthusiasts like Stephens ready to sound the alarm once the star goes up in flames.
Far from being hobbyists, a number of these amateur observers have published their own scientific research. Stephens even built his own observatory as an addition to his home in Rancho Cucamonga.
“The city thinks it’s a greenhouse,” Stephens said. After the inspector came, he removed the screws holding the roof down so he could roll it off and see the clear sky through 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 monitor the star almost nonstop.
Large observatories simply can’t keep such constant watch. Hundreds of scientists are competing for time every night to look at a wide range of astronomical targets. For them, keeping these telescopes on Blaze Star is wasting valuable observing time.
Estimates of when the nova will occur vary, but most astrophysicists agree it will happen before the end of the year, likely in late August.
Once it explodes, there are a few warning systems set up to alert amateurs and professionals. Some observatories have even programmed their telescopes to autonomously abandon their current observing plan and look at the star when the alert comes in, Stephens said.
Large observatories also face another complication. Many of their telescopes are designed to look at the faintest, most dim targets, but the Blaze Star nova will be anything but faint. If these telescopes were pointed at the nova, their sensors would be overloaded, resulting in a washed-out, overexposed image.
That’s why Palomar Observatory, Caltech’s research station in northern San Diego County, isn’t using its iconic 16-foot-wide Hale telescope under its massive white dome. Instead, it’s using a much smaller telescope, called the Gattini-IR, housed in a small, unsuspecting brick building about a quarter-mile away.
Once the nova occurs, Gattini-IR will no longer observe the Blaze Star every few nights, but every few hours.
Scientists say they still have much to learn about novae. For example, physicists still don’t know why some burst every decade while others probably don’t millennia.
Some researchers suspect that novae like the Blaze Star could be precursors to supernovae. These explosions — billions of times brighter than the sun — destroy the star and often leave behind a black hole. Supernovae are also a useful tool for astronomers to measure distances.
However, studying similar events has already led to discoveries.
Recently, scientists have determined that novae eject material into space at a higher velocity than would be predicted based on the intensity of the explosion.
“We want to understand the physics of novae, so with a nova as close as T Coronae Borelias, which will hopefully be well studied by all the telescopes … we can get a very complete picture,” said Caltech professor Kasliwal.
Some of that insight 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 20 years ago, let alone 80 years ago, said Forrest Sims, an amateur astronomer from Apache Junction, Arizona, who also observes the star every clear night.
And amateurs can achieve better coverage than large telescopes because “we typically have complete control over when and where we can aim [our telescopes],” Sims said. “A professional might have to apply for a grant to get a half hour or two hours of time on a large telescope.”
That allows them to collect a lot of data. And with hundreds in the community observing all over the world, they can achieve near-continuous coverage of the Blaze Star. Many, including Sims and Stephens, post their data on the Website of the American Association of Variable Star Observersallowing everyone to use the data.
Stephens remembers reading a journal article about a professional who had managed to observe five asteroids in two years. “I thought, I can do that in a month,” Stephens said. He went on to publish a paper with 10 observations.
One professor was so shocked by the number Stephens could see that she reached out and agreed to fly to Puerto Rico for an asteroid conference just to meet him. They ended up working together — Stephens had the telescopes; she had the connections in the field.
Today, the work of amateur astronomers has become so sophisticated that many people in the field find it difficult to call them amateurs anymore.
“We call ourselves ‘small telescope scientists,'” Sims said. “That sounds nicer, and in some ways, professionals will admit — and not even grudgingly — that the work we do is often of professional caliber.”
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.