A few years before All Creatures Great and Small Was set the vets travelling across the moors of Yorkshire might have seen a new bright star or nova appear in the sky.
Nova 1934 discovered by English amateur JPM Prentice on December
13th, 1934, at mag 3.0 and reached its peak brightness on December 22nd, 1934,
at mag 1.5. This would have made it
brighter than he north star or the stars that make up the group of stars known
as the Plough. It remained visible to the naked eye for several months. The
nova was around 1,600 light years away.
Today the nova is classified as DQ Hercules
A nova the word is Latin for new is a binary star system,
there are two stars here. It was a term used in the Middle Ages when people
thought it was a star being created. This is why they called it a nova. The system is formed of a small white dwarf
star and a much larger cooler star. The white dwarf star is formed of material
that has been squashed together this material astronomers refer to as
degenerate material, it is so heavy that a lump of white dwarf material the
size of a snooker ball would weigh around 70 tons!!
Material from the large cooler star is pulled
gravitationally toward the white dwarf star. It forms a disc of gas which then
falls onto the surface of the white dwarf which the throws a shell of gas into
space which we see and as a bright dot in the sky and we call this a nova.
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