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A Star Went Supernova in 1987. Where Is It Now? - The New York Times
Aug 07, 2020 2 mins, 35 secs
A dense nugget known as a neutron star.

Could the deceased star’s missing core, a mighty mite of ultrahot matter known as a neutron star, be hiding in there.

He estimated that the neutron star left by the explosion would be 2 million to 4 million degrees Kelvin by now, easily enough to heat up the blob.

Any more mass falling on a neutron star could tip it into the endless collapse of a black hole.

Spinning and magnetized, neutron stars can produce the lighthouse-like radio flashes known as pulsars.

“The neutron star behaves exactly like we expected,” said James Lattimer, an astrophysicist at Stony Brook University in New York and a member of Dr.

Astrophysicists reacted cautiously but enthusiastically to the report, noting that the neutron star in question remains invisible, at least with present technology.

Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, called the new discovery “sort of a halfway step.” Astronomers have seen something glowing, he said, but “it’s one thing for a bunch of theorists to say ‘we think it probably formed a neutron star’ and an entirely different thing when astronomers actually find evidence that there is in fact a neutron star there.”.

Supernova 1987A, as it is known, was the closest supernova to Earth in hundreds of years; the Large Magellanic Cloud is only 168,000 light-years away.

Astronomers quickly diagnosed it as a Type II supernova, caused by the collapse of a massive star.

It can end up as a hot dense cinder called a white dwarf, as an even hotter and denser neutron star or as a black hole, depending on its initial mass and other details of its composition.

The star that exploded was subsequently identified as a giant blue star known as Sanduleak -69° 202, which promptly vanished from the sky.

In its prime it was about 19 times as massive as the sun, which puts it in the range that astronomers think should produce a neutron star.

“Neutrinos are indeed key to the supernova and neutron star process,” Dr.

If the neutrinos cannot emerge fast enough to heat an explosion, the supernova is likely to fizzle and the newly-birthed neutron star will collapse into a black hole, Dr.

“People are pretty sure a neutron star formed from the yelp of neutrinos that were seen at the time of the core’s collapse,” Dr.

Page said that neutrinos could also be produced by the collapse into a black hole: “It would be a very short signal, less than a second, while the star is falling into the black hole.” But, he noted, the pulse from SN 1987A lasted some 10 seconds.

“So it needed to have some proto-neutron star surviving there for at least 10 seconds.”.

The star could have later turned into a black hole, if much matter had fallen back on it, he said, but the fact that the supernova was such a strong explosion suggests that did not happen.

The warm blob that is suspected of harboring the neutron star was in a particularly dense region the team called the “keyhole,” where its molecular emanations could barely be detected.

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