Signs of highly ionized atoms in dusty clouds at SN 1987A’s explosion site suggest a powerful source of X-rays — likely a neutron star — lurks within.
Within the dusty cloud left behind by supernova 1987A, the most famous stellar explosion in modern history, astronomers have found compelling evidence for a long-sought neutron star.. The findings are part of a 37-year-old quest to determine what happened in the aftermath of the closest supernova in nearly 400 years and could provide insights into how a neutron star behaves mere decades after its birth.
It’s rare for scientists to have observations of a giant star before it explodes in a supernova — but they got lucky with supernova 1987A. On the left is the blue supergiant before the explosion. On the right is the explosion itself.). Such explosions occur when a star at least eight times the mass of the sun dies. Located at the astronomically close distance of 160,000 light-years, supernova 1987A, as it came to be known, was visible with the naked eye in the night sky for months afterward.
Infrared light travels through dust more easily than other wavelengths. So the infrared eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, are well suited to peering into the cloud surrounding 1987A. With JWST, Kavanagh and his colleagues captured light containing signatures indicating the presence of argon and sulfur in the dusty central region. Tellingly, these elements had been ionized, meaning that some of their electrons had been stripped away.
The team believes there are two possibilities. Supernova 1987A could have left behind a pulsar, a highly magnetized neutron star that generates powerful beams of radiation, much like). Alternatively, the X-rays could be coming from an ordinary neutron star, whose newborn surface would blaze at a million degrees Celsius.
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