Where is the Blaze Star? Why the “new star” T Coronae Borealis has not yet lit up the night sky

The highly anticipated “guest star” of the night sky has yet to deliver his big performance – but we have an update.

For a quick recap, astronomers and stargazers have been watching the constellation Corona Borealis recently, eagerly awaiting the once-in-a-lifetime reactivation of a long-dead star in an explosion powerful enough to briefly match the brightness of Polaris, the North Star. T Coronae Borealis – often called T Cor Bor or T CrB – is home to a white dwarf, a dense, burnt-out star siphoning material from its companion star, which is a massive red giant near the end of its life. This material spirals into an accretion disk around the white dwarf, where it slowly covers the star’s surface. Every 80 years or so, the white dwarf manages to accumulate enough mass to trigger a nuclear explosion, triggering an explosion which reinforces its generally weak magnitude from 10 to a bright 2.0 — this should look like a “new star” in the night sky for us.