“Seeing that star blow up is much rarer than a solar eclipse,” NASA astronomer Bill Cooke told NPR in March.

Dr. Rebekah Hounsell, an assistant research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center who specializes in nova events, said in a press release earlier this month that such explosions typically occur on the same star in repeated intervals.

“There are a few recurrent novae with very short cycles, but typically, we don’t often see a repeated outburst in a human lifetime, and rarely one so relatively close to our own system,” said Hounsell.

An outburst of T Coronae Borealis was scientifically observed in 1866, but it may have also been spotted as far back as 1217 by a German monk who documented an object that “shone with great light” for “many days.”

“Typically, nova events are so faint and far away that it’s hard to clearly identify where the erupting energy is concentrated,” said NASA Goddard chief of the Astroparticle Physics Laboratory Elizabeth Hays.

“This one will be really close, with a lot of eyes on it, studying the various wavelengths and hopefully giving us data to start unlocking the structure and specific processes involved.”

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