Astronomers Discover First-of-Their-Kind Doomed Stars On Our Doorstep [Video]

Scientists have discovered an extremely rare pair of stars only around 150 light years away in the Milky Way galaxy that will collide and explode in 23 billion years.

The blast—were we around to see it—would appear around 10 times brighter than the moon in the night sky.

This form of explosion, known as a “type Ia supernova” occurs when a white dwarf—the dense core remnant of a star—builds too much mass and is unable to withstand its own gravity and explodes.

The discovery of the binary star system was made by astronomers at the University of Warwick in England.

“We predict that the binary will explode dynamically by means of a double detonation that will destroy both stars just before they merge,” appearing as a type Ia supernova with a peak apparent magnitude that’s around 200,000 times brighter than Jupiter, the researchers noted in the study.

Lead researcher James …