The Flower Moon will rise near a red supergiant star on Thursday night.
The moon will peak 50 minutes after sunset and will be visible in the east.
Adding more wonder to this event will be the star Antares, which is about 600 light years from Earth, as it will appear very close to the Flower Moon.
The star, although a glowing ruby color, is nearing the end of its life because it is running out of fuel and is expected to explode in at least a million years.
The moon will appear full at 9:35 a.m. Thursday and will peak 50 minutes after the sun sets. Pictured is a super Flower Moon that occurred on May 25, 2023. Photograph taken on May 22 in New York City: Preview of the Flower Moon.
The term “flower moon” also marked the beginning of the Reign of Terror against the Osage Nation in the 1920s, when white men murdered members of the tribe to inherit their oil assets.
The historical events inspired the 2017 book, ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, written by journalist David Grann which was later made into a film by Martin Scorses.
The Flower Moon coincides with the flowers that bloom in May, according to The Old Farmer’s Almanac.
And it is also called ‘Mother’s Moon’, ‘Milk Moon’ or ‘Corn Planting Moon’.
Native Americans named the celestial event because they knew it was time to start planting crops.
According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, moonrise will occur at approximately 8:35 pm ET on Thursday, crossing the meridian at 1:14 am before setting at 5:46 am on Friday. tomorrow.
The Flower Moon will also shine near Antares, an aging giant star that is about to explode, located in the constellation of Scorpio.
The moon will appear near Antares, but will eventually block the star as it travels across the night sky.
The star has been the subject of study for decades, as scientists closely monitor its collapse. It will collapse and become a supernova: the powerful and luminous explosion of a star.
Antares is only about two or three percent as old as the sun, but because of its large mass, its time is almost up.
The star has a diameter of 400 to 430 million miles, while the sun is approximately 865,000 miles.
Scientists captured images of Antares in 2017 using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLTI), revealing the most detailed image yet.
The photographs showed that there was turbulent, low-density gas much farther from the star than expected.
The team suggested that this movement could not be the result of convection, the process by which the movement of matter transfers energy from the core to the outer atmosphere of many stars.
This indicated that a new, currently unknown process may be necessary to explain these motions in the extended atmospheres of stars like Antares.
