Stumbling upon a number of articles published in the last two weeks on Supernova 1987A, a phenomenon observed unsurprisingly in the year 1987, I had two questions. First, why were people so excited to talk about it on its 30th anniversary? Second, what is a supernova? They look pretty darn cool in all of the pictures.
Supernovas are exploding stars. The last explosion within our own galaxy is thought to have been around a hundred years ago. In a binary star system, a white dwarf star builds up matter that it takes from its companion star until it becomes, in a sense, overloaded. These are called Type I supernovae. They are actually used as a standard measurement of light throughout the universe because they are considered to all produce approximately the same amount of energy. Type II supernovae are from single stars. The supernova is somewhat like its final grand breath. As the star runs out of fuel, matter flows into its core until it is overloaded and the core collapses in on itself. Its own gravity pulls it inwards. If you forgot just how small our sun really is, one of these explosions releases more energy than our sun will throughout its entire lifetime. (Don’t worry. Our sun isn’t big enough to create a supernova. Its death will be much less impressive.) These explosions carry debris containing incredibly important elements vast distances. This allows the birth of new stars and the birth of elements (the laws you learned in chemistry do not apply in the explosion of stars).
On February 23, 1987, Ian Shelton spotted 1987A while in the Atacama Desert in Chile. It was just a new star that appeared when he developed one of his photographs from the night in the observatory. It was in fact so bright that it could be viewed without a telescope. The supernova itself was not rare. It was it proximity that made it the sort of rare event astronomers live for. Over the next few months, and the next few decades, information gained from the supernova progressed alongside scientific advancements. There was a five-hour difference between detections of neutrinos in Europe and Japan. There were many questions about the phenomenon. Was it the explosion of Sanduleak or a companion star? Did the neutrino particles (rare and still little-understood particles that play an important role in these explosions) detected actually have mass? Questions like this led to new discoveries about supernovas that have been applied to the other ones we observed afterward. They are still studying 1987A today. Since, you know, the universe is mind-blowing and this phenomenon is STILL GOING ON.
If you are more confused than you were five minutes ago, that is okay. Studying these things always reminds how little I really know, how littler we all know. I think often we try to understand the world as if we created it. We did not. It doesn’t matter what you believe about the origin of the universe, of universes. None of it says that a human being created the laws of the universe. We are all attempting to understand laws and ideas that do not necessarily fit within the parameters of own minds. That doesn’t need to scare us, though. There is a freedom in knowing that the limits we put on ourselves do not apply to the rest of the world.
Katherine Estep is a junior majoring in neuroscience.
Sources
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/5-8/features/nasa-knows/what-is-a-supernova.html
http://www.space.com/6638-supernova.html – Check out Supernova SN 2008D
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/supernova-story-continues-just-science-journalism
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/30-year-anniversary-supernova-1987a