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Since its first appearance in the southern night sky on February 24, 1987, Supernova 1987A has been one of the most studied objects in the history of astronomy.
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 like 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 passed through the debris ring.
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Material provided by Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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