Have you ever seen a star explode? You’ll soon have the chance

For the past three weeks, Bob Stephens has trained his telescope on the same two stars every clear night in the hope of witnessing one of the most violent events in the universe: a nova explosion 100,000 times brighter than the Sun.

The outburst, which scientists say could happen at any moment, has attracted interest from major observatories around the world and promises to expand our knowledge of turbulent binary star systems.

But despite all the advanced observing power that NASA and other scientific institutions can muster, astrophysicists rely on scores of amateur astronomers like Stephens to be the first ...