A lot of people don’t realize that there is super important science you can do with your unaided eye. There is, and one of my favorite tasks, for those with a good memory, is watching the sky for novae. 

Unlike supernovae, which destroy the system they are in, novae are events of many different kinds that cause a stellar remnant to suddenly increase in brightness in ways that make for cool science. Since there are a lot of these explody stars in the sky, professional astronomers can’t easily monitor all of them all of the time, but there are a lot of amateur astronomers who have memorized the locations of their favorite systems and then check the sky for new novae as they walk from their work to their car or their car to their house.

And last week, two such observers, Keith Geary of Ireland and Ernesto Guido of Italy, spotted the star RS Oph in an outburst. This is a recurrent nova. This system has a tiny, dense white dwarf star that is eating material off a companion. Once enough of this consumed material piles up, the white dwarf goes nuclear and lights up the system. In this case, the system’s brightness increased by over a factor of 600 and went from something you can only see with a telescope to something you can see with your eye. We have finding charts on our website, DailySpace.org, and we encourage all of you – weather permitting – to go out and see this new and temporary star and then watch as it fades away.

If you haven’t heard of the constellation Ophiuchus before, it’s the constellation of the serpent bearer, and for a bunch of us born in December, it’s the constellation the Sun was in on the day of our birth. Ophiuchus and its serpents are nestled between Sagittarius, Scorpio, and Hercules. As to why this zodiac sign is left out and ignored, and folks like me are told we were born in Sagittarius, I’m just a scientist. And this is a reminder that astrology doesn’t use the actual sky or science.

Instead of trying to guess at the reasoning of ancient Greeks, I’m going to go out, catch whatever lingering bits of the Perseids may still be out there, and enjoy myself a nova. Join me?

More Information

Rare Naked-Eye Nova (spaceweatherarchive.com)

A Rare Nova Visible To The Eye. See It While You Can! (EarthSky)

Is Ophiuchus A Constellation Or A Sign? (EarthSky)