I love how fluid the concept of time is.
Feb. 21st, 2004 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
novapsycheHubble eyes new phase of supernova explosion
Astronomers first saw the star explode -- an event called a supernova -- in 1987. It shone as bright as 100 million suns for several months.
Robert Kirshner of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led the latest observations. He explained what's going on around the star named 1987A. When the star first exploded, ultraviolet light raced outward and lit up a previously unknown ring of gaseous debris that the star had presumably spat out about 20,000 years prior.
"Then there's a blast wave going out from the supernova to the ring," Kirshner said in a telephone interview. "We all knew it was going to hit in a decade or so."
In 1996, that shock wave began to plow into the debris ring.
[...] The last supernova to shine so brightly in Earth's skies was spotted by Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.
1987A was generated by a star 20 times more massive than the Sun. It resides in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Because of the time it takes light from the event to reach Hubble, the explosion actually occurred 160,000 years ago, in the time frame of its origin.
Astronomers first saw the star explode -- an event called a supernova -- in 1987. It shone as bright as 100 million suns for several months.
Robert Kirshner of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics led the latest observations. He explained what's going on around the star named 1987A. When the star first exploded, ultraviolet light raced outward and lit up a previously unknown ring of gaseous debris that the star had presumably spat out about 20,000 years prior.
"Then there's a blast wave going out from the supernova to the ring," Kirshner said in a telephone interview. "We all knew it was going to hit in a decade or so."
In 1996, that shock wave began to plow into the debris ring.
[...] The last supernova to shine so brightly in Earth's skies was spotted by Johannes Kepler 400 years ago.
1987A was generated by a star 20 times more massive than the Sun. It resides in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Because of the time it takes light from the event to reach Hubble, the explosion actually occurred 160,000 years ago, in the time frame of its origin.