More than 33 years of searching, astronomers already after the compact Remnant of the stellar explosion SN 1987A. This was on 24. February 1987 in the Large Magellanic cloud, a neighboring galaxy of the milky way in about 160,000 light-years away, as a “Supernova” came on. Now a major discovery is done: the radio telescope composite of Alma in the Chilean highlands, a Team led by Phil Cigan of Cardiff University in Wales, discovered a dense gas cloud, which is apparently brought on by a bright and very small object in your Interior lights. Very probably, it is the nuclear density pressed together the former core of the exploded star, called a neutron star. If the discovery is confirmed, it would be a corpse, the youngest Star, the astronomers were able to yet track down.
Originally, the star, whose furious were able to track the end of Stargazer, over three decades ago in the southern hemisphere with the naked eye was, well, fourteen – to nineteen times more massive than our sun. Such giant stars are known to explode after the use up your fuel as a Supernova, but what strut apart apart in the explosion, clouds of remains of them, is subject of scientific debates. Computer models predict the formation of a compact neutron star, if the approximately one and a half solar masses heavy star’s core, within a fraction of a second to a size of about 25 kilometers is compressed. In the matter of the star core is compressed into neutrons; the remaining Material is so dense that a cube would weigh sugar large piece of neutron star matter more than all the people on earth together.
as a result of his young age, this neutron star as a Remnant of SN 1987A would have to be very hot and bright lights. However, despite an intensive search, has not been achieved so far, such a compact body in the explosion of nebula, the Supernova track. Some researchers have suggested that the star’s core could collapse maybe be a Black hole. Such an object would itself emit any radiation. In contrast, the low mass of the progenitor star, and the fact that physicists on earth were able to shortly after the Explosion to demonstrate a surge of Neutrinos from SN 1987A, however. Neutrinos are extremely light elementary particles that move nearly at the speed of light are. They are formed when atomic nuclei combine with electrons to neutrons, and is therefore considered as a safe indication for the formation of a neutron star.
The discovery of Cigan and his Team completed the search – and explains why it has taken so long: the hottest shots of Alma, the researchers found a small compact cloud near the explosion centre, whose luminosity can best be achieved by a hot, dense source in its center. You reported already in November 2019 in the journal “The Astrophysical Journal”. It is very likely to be the sought neutron star, as is proven by a study of Dany Page of the University of Mexico, which was published in the current issue of the “Astrophysical Journal”.
a neutron star in a cloud of star material
Page, which for years has dealt with the study of SN 1987A, occupies, together with several colleagues, that only a neutron star explains all the observational data of Cigan and his Team. The measured brightness of the cloud corresponds to the value one would expect for a 33-year-old and about 1.5 solar masses of heavy neutron star as a source of energy.
in addition, the cloud is exactly in the right place, a bit far to the North of the Explosionsorts: model calculations had shown that the violence of the Explosion would have thrown every possible Remnant of several hundred kilometers per second, exactly in the Fort. The neutron star is in a dense cloud of former star material, explains why he had so long successfully a discovery deprived: First, on the sharp Alma images let you identify.