People like me find space science endlessly fascinating, but your average Joe, raised on a diet of Hollywood blockbusters just can’t seem to get excited by a the wonders of the Universe unless it involves buildings, space stations or whole planets exploding. Rather than remaining in their ivory tower seclusion looking down on such people as I am inclined to do, the good people at Nasa have decided to try and win them over by speaking their language.

The result is “Closest Approach” a 2 minute trailer for an event that’s due to take place in the spring of 2018, when a city sized pulsar will pass close to a Sun that is fifteen times as large as ours and 10,000 times as bright. To be factually correct, given the Laws of Physics and the fact these objects are about 5,000 light years away, these events actually took place about the same time as people in Egypt started using hieroglyphs, but we don’t get to see them for nearly three more years.

The objects in question are a Be star named MT91 213 and a pulsar named J2032+4127 (J2032 to it’s friends). J2032 was discovered in 2009 by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope but it was when this discovery was passed on to observers at Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, at the University of Manchester, and they got to study it over a long period that they noticed something odd. According to Andrew Lyne, professor of physics at the University of Manchester “We detected strange variations in the rotation and the rate at which the rotation slows down, behavior we have not seen in any other isolated pulsar, Ultimately, we realized these peculiarities were caused by motion around another star, making this the longest-period binary system containing a radio pulsar”. The pulsar orbits the star approximately once every 25 years and is currently on it’s way towards point in that orbit to the star.

All stars throw off massive amounts of energy and are surrounded by huge disks of dust and gas and MT91 213, being so large, will have those qualities in spades. A pulsar is a remnant of a supernova, a massive star that exploded, leaving only a small but super dense core. J2032 is only 12 miles across, but weighs nearly twice as much as our sun, it’s also spinning 7 times a second. The mass and spin along with it’s massive magnetic field mean that when the two get closer there should be some pretty impressive fireworks. Ben Stappers, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester said “This forewarning of the energetic fireworks expected at closest approach in three years’ time allows us to prepare to study the system across the entire electromagnetic spectrum with the largest telescopes”.

Scientists are hoping the cosmic fireworks will help them to measure the massive star’s gravity, magnetic field, stellar wind and disk properties. Hopefully this movie will live up to the trailer.