Time-lapse shows thirty years of the life of the 1987A supernova

The supernova was the cataclysmic death of a blue supergiant star, some 168,000 light-years away from Earth, in the Great Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our own galaxy of the Milky Way. It was the most brilliant supernova to appear in our skies since Kepler's Supernova in 1604 and the first since the invention of the telescope.

The bright new star was first sighted by two astronomers working at the Las Campanas Observatory in northern Chile on the night of the 24th: Ian Shelton of the University of Toronto, and a telescope operator at the observatory, Oscar Duhalde.

Yvette Cendes, a graduate student at the University of Toronto and at the Leiden Observatory, created a time frame showing the sequelae of the supernova over a 25-year period, from 1992 to 2017. The images show slamming in the debris that rang the original star before it disappeared.

In an accompanying document, published in Astrophysical Journal on October 31, Cendes and his colleagues add to the evidence that the expanding remnant is fashioned – not as a ring similar to Saturn's – but as a donut, a form known as the torus.

They also confirm that the shock wave has now reached a speed of about 1,000 kilometers per second. The acceleration is due to the expanding bull that has pbaded through the debris ring.

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The co-authors of Cendes are Professor Bryan Gaensler, Director of the Dunlap Institute, and Dunlap Postdoctoral Researcher, Cherry Ng. The time-lapse was created from radio observations made with the CSIRO Australia compact telescope network at the Paul Wild Observatory in New South Wales, Australia.

Yvette Cendes

Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics

University of Toronto

e: [email protected]

Twitter: @whereisyvette

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For the full press release and images: http: // www.dunlap.utoronto.California/timelapse-shows-thirty-years-in-the-life-of-the-supernova-1987a /