On February 24, 1987, a supernova was detected on the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The supernova was dubbed SN 1987A. It seems that a star was formed following this massive explosion, and it didn’t collapse in on itself to form a black hole.
If confirmed to have survived, this star would then be the youngest star known to mankind, being only 33 years old.
To date, the youngest supernova remnant is the 330 years old Cassiopeia A, about 11,000 light-years away from Earth inside the Milky Way.
Analyzing high-resolution imagery from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of astronomers was able to get a closer look at what was left behind following SN 1987A.
They found a hot “blob” inside the core of the supernova, likely a gas cloud shrouding the neutron star. The star itself would be far too small to be detected directly, as it’s extremely small and dense — the mass of 1.4 times the Sun inside a sphere that’s only 15 miles across.
More details about this stellar story over at Futurism.
(Image Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/A. Angelich. Visible light image: the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. X-Ray image: The NASA Chandra X-Ray Observatory/ Wikimedia Commons)
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How can we observe a star that's only 330 years old if it takes 11,000 years for the light to get here?
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