Why is supernova 1987a important

And that evening, Shelton was the telescope operator at Las Campanas Observatory. It had caught an image of the night sky. But it was only a negative. So Shelton headed off to the darkroom. Back then, photographs had to be developed by hand from negatives instead of appearing instantly on a screen. As a quick quality check, the astronomer compared the just-developed picture with one he had taken the night before. And one star caught his eye.

But to be sure, he stepped outside and looked up. He walked down the road to another telescope. There, he asked astronomers what they could say about an object that bright appearing in the Large Magellanic Cloud, just outside the Milky Way. Shelton ran outside with the others to double-check with their own eyes. In the group was Oscar Duhalde. He saw the same thing earlier that evening.

They were witnessing the explosion of a star. This supernova was the closest seen in nearly four centuries. And it was bright enough to view without a telescope. But a supernova close enough to be seen with the unaided eye is rare. In the Milky Way, astronomers estimate, a supernova goes off every 30 to 50 years.

But until that time, the most recent one seen was in At a distance of about , light-years, the new one was the closest since the time of Galileo. Astronomers would dub it SN for supernova A indicating it was the first of that year.

He is an astrophysicist at Princeton University in New Jersey. Most heavyweight stars end their lives as supernovas. These explosive events also may trigger the birth of new ones.

Such cataclysms can change the fate of entire galaxies by stirring up the gas needed to build more stars. Most chemical elements heavier than iron, perhaps even all of them, are forged in the chaos of such explosions.

Thirty years after its discovery, supernova A remains a celebrity. It was the first supernova for which the original star could be identified. And it spewed the first neutrinos — a kind of particle smaller than an atom — detected from beyond the solar system.

Those subatomic particles confirmed decades-old theories about what happens in the heart of an exploding star. New observatories draw out more details as shock waves from the explosion keep plowing through the gas between stars.

Communication was a bit slower when A exploded. So a driver took off to La Serena, a town some kilometers 62 miles away. From there a telegram was dispatched to share the unexpected news with the IAU. Before the internet, telegrams were how people quickly sent written messages long distances. At first, there were doubters. He is an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Supernova A, the first supernova observed in , was the brightest and nearest supernova to Earth in almost four centuries.

Before it exploded, it was a luminous blue giant star that put out , times as much power as the Sun. After the explosion, the expanding debris glowed in visible light with the power of ,, suns for four months. Supernova A is located in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. This galaxy is about , light years from Earth, so when it was first observed by optical telescopes in , the event had actually occurred about , B.

We are seeing a delayed-action replay of the actual event. Message sent Thank you for sharing. Help us spread the word. Get Involved. Sign Up. Thank you for signing up. Stay tuned. We look forward to sharing more. Totsuka, Y. SnA was the nearest supernova to us since the invention of the telescope. Kirshner said the object could be obscured by dust or it could have become a black hole.

The core of the shredded star is now glowing because of radioactive titanium that was cooked up in the explosion. Unfortunately, supernovas are rare, and few of them could be visualized at naked eye due to huge interstellar distances, dust clouds, etc.

Anyway, hundreds of astronomers in the South hemisphere pointed their telescopes as soon as the supernova was spotted. It was also the first supernova to be detected by its neutrino burst, though it was realized only after its visual identification. Types Ib, Ic and II origin from the core collapse of a Red Supergiant after the star exhausts its nuclear fuel, which prevents the gravitational collapse.