Explosion that ‘will change the sky’ predicted by astronomers

Science Adina Camarasu
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An explosion was predicted by a team of astronomers led by Larry Molnar from Calvin College (Michigan, USA). They believe that in 2022 there will be an explosion that will be perfectly visible from Earth even without a telescope.

‘We are facing one of the rarest occasions where we can foresee an explosion. It will be something that has not been ever seen’, said Molnar, according to the Spanish daily ABC.

It is a binary system, two stars orbiting around each other and which, according to calculations, will be merged into one in 2022, producing a catastrophic explosion.

At that time, the resulting star will be, for a while, the brightest object in the sky. The star will be visible as part of the constellation Cygnus and will add a new bright star to the Northern Cross.

Molnar began to study the star KIC 9832227 in late 2013, after attending a conference where astronomer Karen Kinemuchi presented a study about the brightness variation of this star, without considering it a ‘pulsating’ star or a binary system.

He considered this as a personal challenge and decided to study the subject in depth.

Larry Molnar discovered that in reality, it was a binary ‘contact’ system, in which the two stars are sharing a common atmosphere, like two peanuts in the same shell.

Starting from this point of view, Molnar explained how Daniel Van Noord, a student at Calvin College, ‘managed to determine a very precise orbital period with the data received from Kepler satellite’.

This result reminded the astronomer of a study published by his colleague Romuald Tylenda, who looked how another star (V1309) behaved, just moments before it unexpectedly exploded in 2008, producing a red nova.

Previous records of this explosion showed a binary contact with an orbital period becoming shorter and increasing speeds. For Molnar, this model of orbital changes allowed him to interpret the new data coming from the star he studied.

Molnar noted that the orbital period of the star KIC 9832227 continued to change in 2013 and 2014, but in 2015 presented his results to the American Astronomical Society, stressing that KIC 9832227 was likely to follow the same steps as V1309.