The highly-anticipated "guest star" of the night sky has yet to deliver its grand performance — but we have an update.
For a quick recap, astronomers and stargazers have been gazing toward the Corona Borealis constellation recently, eagerly awaiting the once-in-a-lifetime reignition of a long-dead star in an explosion powerful enough to briefly match the brilliance 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 close to the end of its life. This material spirals into an accretion disk around the white dwarf, where it slowly coats the star's surface. Every 80 years or so, the white dwarf manages to accumulate enough mass to trigger a nuclear explosion, sparking an outburst that boosts its typically dim magnitude of 10 to a bright 2.0 — that should look like a "new star" in the night sky to us.
