Supernova 1987A
Next: February 23, 2027
The night a star said goodbye.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of 23 February 1987, when news of an exploding star first reached Earth. That day two large underground detectors, one in Japan and one in the USA, registered a burst of high-energy neutrinos. Within hours, in the early morning of 24 February, the new light was spotted by eye and on a photographic plate at Las Campanas in Chile by Oscar Duhalde and Ian Shelton. Supernova 1987A had exploded in the Large Magellanic Cloud, 163,000 light-years away, and it was the first supernova visible to the naked eye in 383 years.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance, but observatories such as ESO in Chile mark round-number anniversaries with new images and look-backs at what the star taught them. The supernova sits in a southern sky, so on a clear, dark night anyone in the southern hemisphere can find the Large Magellanic Cloud, where it happened. Elsewhere, it is a good day to visit a planetarium or look up the latest pictures of its glowing rings.
Did you know
- It gave astronomers several firsts, including the first detection of neutrinos from an exploding star and the first sighting of the star itself on older photographic plates.
- The supernova was so bright that some of the largest telescopes at ESO's La Silla Observatory had to be partly covered to observe it.
- In 2002 the Japanese physicist Masatoshi Koshiba shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting cosmic neutrinos with an enormous water tank inside a mine.
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