Posted on 03/24/2021 6:45:07 PM PDT by BenLurkin
According to reports in The Astronomer's Telegram, a star in the region of the constellation of Cassiopeia has just gone nova, and the glow is still visible in the night sky. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere and have even a basic telescope, you might want to head out and point it in that direction.
The first detection was made on 18 March 2021 by amateur astronomer Yuji Nakamura from the Mie Prefecture in Japan. In four frames captured using a 135-millimeter lens and a 15-second exposure, a bright, magnitude 9.6 glow was visible where none had been just four days earlier.
The find was quickly reported to the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and scientists zeroed in to find out what was going on.
Using Kyoto University's Seimei Telescope, astronomers at the NAOJ and Kyoto University conducted spectroscopic observations, and used the 0.4-meter telescope at Kyoto University for multi-color photometric observations.
They confirmed that the event is indeed what we classify as a classical nova, the most common of the stellar explosions, and gave it the name V1405 Cas.
A classical nova is not the huge kaboom of a massive star, but an explosion on the surface of a white dwarf with a main-sequence binary companion on a close orbit - generally less than 12 hours. As the two stars whirl around each other, the tiny dense white dwarf siphons hydrogen from its larger, fluffier companion.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencealert.com ...
Got my star walk 2 out but it’s cloudy here. rained all day. At least i know where to look.
Cosmic socialists. Cthulhu returns.
Cosmic warming.
Trump’s fault.
Women and BIPOC hardest hit.
Thanks BenLurkin.
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