Blaze Star: How To Prepare For The Biggest Sky Event For 79 Years [View all]

By Jamie Carter Senior Contributor. Jamie Carter is an award-winning reporter who covers the night sky.

Mar 27, 2025, 05:00am EDT



An artist's rendering of T Coronae Borealis, also known as T CrB, a recurrent nova in the constellation Corona Borealis. It is a binary system composed of a red giant star and a white dwarf star, surrounded by an accretion disc, and has outbursts approximately every 80 years

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Are you ready for the “Blaze Star” to erupt? When T Coronae Borealis (T CrB) — a dim star in the constellation Coronoa Borealis — “goes nova” and becomes visible to the naked eye for a few weeks, it will be all over the media. You’ll read terrible headlines like “New star lights-up night sky” written by desk-bound reporters who know nothing about stargazing. Almost everyone on the planet will be taking a peek and mostly getting completely lost and confused.

However, if you get organized, do a little homework, and —most importantly — get outside and look up soon, you’ll be in with a chance of getting much more from a true once-in-a-lifetime celestial event. You can be among the few who can say you saw, appreciated, and understood how lucky you were to witness such a rare event.

Here’s everything you need to know to prepare for the “Blaze Star”/T Coronae Borealis/T CrB to go nova:

What Is The ‘Blaze Star’/T Coronae Borealis/T CrB?

Nicknamed the “Blaze Star,” T Coronae Borealis (T CrB) is a binary system — a star system like the solar system, but with two stars — in which one explodes every 80 years. This is not uncommon. Binary stars explode all the time — in cosmic time. Explosions could be multiple centuries apart, even more. In one average human lifetime, there is only one binary star system that does so, and that’s the “Blaze Star”/T Coronae Borealis/T CrB.

It could explode as soon as Thursday, March 27, surging in brightness from very dim and invisible to the naked eye to bright enough to see. This is what astronomers call a “nova” — a new star — that results from a rare stellar eruption.

More:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamiecartereurope/2025/03/27/blaze-star-how-to-prepare-for-the-biggest-sky-event-for-79-years/


(Blaze Star should not be confused with the 1950's burlesque individual, Tempest Storm.)