Professor Predicts Binary Star Collision Will Light Up Night Sky
In 2022, a binary star system will merge creating a massive explosion visible from Earth by the naked eye. Astronomers say this stellar collision in the Cygnus system will create what’s known as a red nova, in the first ever predicted collision of a binary star system.
These stars, known as KIC 9832227, are an eclipsing system, meaning they’re locked in a cosmic dance around each other, observed to have grown shorter over the past five years. The stellar companions were first observed by Calvin College professor, Lawrence Molner.
Molner is monitoring the system with a low budget and relatively small telescope to predict the stars’ collision. He says typically observations of this magnitude involve billions of dollars and teams numbering in the thousands. But rarely will a phenomenon such as this achieve that level of funding, due to the low probability of prediction accuracy.
“It’s a one-in-a-million chance that you can predict an explosion,” Molner said. “It’s never been done before.”
Though binary mergers like this have been observed before, it’s usually after the fact. If Molner’s prediction holds up it will be a first. The only other red nova to have been observed after a collision was by astronomer Romuald Tylenda, in 2008.
When the two stars eventually collide, they will produce what’s called a luminous red nova – an explosion that releases energy tantamount to all of the energy our sun will release in its entire lifetime, and it will be visible without a telescope for up to a month.
After the merge, the stars will join to form a larger, hotter main sequence star. The collision will result in an increased brightness of ten thousand fold and will glow bright in the Cygnus swan constellation.
When Molner talks about predicting the stars collision, it’s actually about predicting something that has already happened, nearly 2000 years ago. That’s because this binary star system is 1,800 light years away from us, so Molner is predicting that these stars collided 1,800 years ago and the light emitted from them will reach is in about four more years.
Molner admits he doesn’t really know whether the stars collided or not, it’s simply a prediction. He said we weren’t supposed to discover this system and that it essentially happened by chance. But if he’s right, he’ll make history.
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Alleged Volcanic Eruption on Mars Sparks NASA Cover-Up Conspiracy
Conspiracy and speculation erupted across the internet yesterday over an alleged volcanic plume stretching roughly 1,200 miles across the Martian atmosphere. The plume appears to originate from the planet’s supposedly dormant Arsia Mons volcano.
Images of the activity were taken on Sept. 24 by the Mars Express orbiter and later published by the European Space Agency.
According to NASA, volcanic activity on the red planet ceased some 50 million years ago after Earth’s Cretaceous-Paleogene event that killed off the dinosaurs, but some believe this latest imaging shows otherwise.
Spurred by conjecture from a popular YouTube conspiracy channel, claims of volcanic activity on Mars reignited theories of government cover-ups and strange happenings within NASA, the FBI and other controversial government agencies.
Many are pointing to last month’s Sunspot National Observatory shutdown, the switch to a limited “safe mode” on the Hubble and Chandra telescopes, and the sudden failure of NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover as evidence that strange events occurring on the planet may be intentionally obfuscated.
Arsia Mons is located within a tightly situated line of volcanoes on Mars, collectively known as Tharsis Montes, which lie in the shadow of Olympus Mons – the largest volcano in our solar system (more than twice the size of Mt. Everest).
Arsia Mons happens to be the planet’s second largest volcano in terms of volume and is home to a series of caves NASA has studied as the best places to situate research and habitation modules. Could there be something already underway?
“This project developed a revolutionary system to exploit the novel idea of extraterrestrial cave use” stated a project summary published in 2004, further explaining that two “missions” were tested to gather data.
Arsia Mons is known to have an annual whether phenomenon in which sunlight warms the area around the volcano, bringing small amounts of dust into the air. Rising air currents bring this dust and other fine sediment above the volcano’s caldera into a thick, spiraling cloud that is big enough to be seen by a probe orbiting the planet.
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But the latest plume looks nothing like the spiraling cloud recorded from this phenomenon in the past. Instead it appears as more of a streaking trail that’s persisted over the course of weeks.
NASA has attributed the plume to water ice clouds that are gathering over the volcano. The agency says that at certain times of year, the small amounts of water in the atmosphere freeze and condense near areas of high altitude, notably above this volcanic region.
If this is the case, then maybe there’s significantly more water on the red planet than previously believed and we should study the areas it’s sublimating from.
But then again, there’s always some simple explanation from NASA that seems to make everyone’s concerns seem trivial. Is this really just a storm or are they covering up something far greater?
For more on the drips of disclosure coming from NASA’s Mars operations, check out this episode of Deep Space:
