Abstract
At 7:35 Universal Time on February 23, 1987, they started to arrive. Too faint to be detected for another 3 hours, they were the first messengers announcing that something momentous had happened in a galaxy not so far, far away. A giant blue star, originally some 20 times more massive than our Sun, had finally found that its own gravity was too much to bear. It had collapsed in on itself and then rebounded in an enormous supernova explosion. Traveling at the speed of light, photons from this massive explosion had reached Planet Earth some 150,000 years later. Over the course of the next day, Supernova 1987A, as it became known as, had brightened by more than 500 times until at last it was spotted by Ian Shelton at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Amateur observers helped to fix the exact time at which the explosion happened, and their results were later confirmed by the detection of neutrinos (will-o-the-wisp particles that interact with matter very rarely and weigh so little that they can travel at almost the speed of light) that were produced in the dying moments of the star that produced the supernova.
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Miller, S. (2012). Shooting the Rapids: The Life and Death of the Earliest Stars. In: The Chemical Cosmos. Astronomers’ Universe. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8444-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-8444-9_3
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