On the evening of 23 February 1987, a young Canadian astronomer named Ian Shelton walked outside of the dome at the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatoryin Chile and took a photo of a nearby galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) with his Nikon camera. Shelton developed the photo and noticed a bright star where none had been seen before. He told his colleague Oscar Duhalde and news spread around the world.
Supernova N 1987A was independently discovered by Albert Jones in New Zealand, and Colin Henshaw in Zimbabwe.
N 1987A was a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the LMC. It occurred approximately 51.4 kiloparsecs from Earth, close enough that it was visible to the naked eye. It could be seen from the Southern Hemisphere.
It was the closest observed supernova since SN 1604, which occurred in the Milky Way itself. As the first supernova discovered in 1987, it was labeled "1987A".
Its brightness peaked in May with an apparent magnitude of about 3 and slowly declined in the following months. It was the first opportunity for modern astronomers to see a supernova.
Since 51.4 kiloparsecs is approximately 168,000 light-years, the cosmic event itself happened approximately 168,000 years prior to its observation in 1987.
Most supernovas grow dimmer with the passage of time as they release their energy. But the X-ray and radio emissions from 1987A grew brighter because its shock wave had crashed into a dense cloud of gas and dust.
1 comment:
Supernova SN 1987A was discovered by Ian Shelton, Oscar Duhalde and Albert Jones. Any other SN 1987A discovery claims and attributions are incorrect. Please refer to the following link for verification:
http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/iauc/04300/04316.html
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