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Nova explosion visible to the naked eye expected any day now
Sometime between May and September, a white dwarf is expected to go thermonuclear.
When you look at the northern sky, you can follow the arm of the Big Dipper as it arcs around toward the bright star called Arcturus. They are still pretty hot, though, and they're super dense, with a mass comparable to our Sun squeezed into a volume resembling the Earth. Then the process starts all over again because the explosion isn’t large enough to disrupt the red giant, the donor of all this hydrogen, so it just keeps doing its thing,” Van Belle told Ars.
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