How will the 3 - D structure of
SN 1987A continue to change over time?
Even though the new ALMA observations shed important light on
SN 1987A, there are still several questions that remain.
The new ALMA image and animation show vast new stores of SiO and CO in discrete, tangled clumps within the core of
SN 1987A.
For decades, radio, optical, and even X-ray observatories have studied
SN 1987A, but obscuring dust in the remnant made it difficult to analyze the supernovaSupernova RemnantThe expanding shell of gas from a supernova explosion.
However, earlier observations of
SN 1987A with infrared telescopes, made during the first 500 days after the explosion, detected only a small amount of hot dust.
The insights gained from studying
SN 1987A have in turn helped astronomers better classify and model the 200 much fainter supernovas detected each year.
But the progenitor of
SN 1987A turned out to be a smaller, hotter kind of star called a blue supergiant.
Then on February 23, 1987, light from
SN 1987A reached Earth, completing a 163,000 - year journey from the Large Magellanic Cloud and bringing with it a panoply of surprises.
ALMA resolves
SN 1987A's dust factory and particle accelerator.American Astronomical Society Meeting, National Harbor, Md., January 6, 2014.
Observations of
SN 1987A with the COSTAR - corrected Faint Object Camera.
Despite several surprises along the way,
SN 1987A didn't lead to a fundamental shift in how astronomers thought about supernovas.
«
SN 1987A taught us that we did not know everything,» Kirshner says.
At a distance of about 166,000 light - years,
SN 1987A was the closest since the time of Galileo.
First results from the Faint Object Camera:
SN 1987a.
The destruction of the circumstellar ring of
SN 1987a.
Not exact matches
With the detectors available at the time, scientists managed to nab just two dozen of
1987A's neutrinos (
SN: 3/21/87, p. 180).