SN 1987A!

SN 1987A!

Postby Rommie » Thu Sep 06, 2018 11:03 am

So if anyone wants to see what I did with my time last year, check out this gif! It's going to be in a press release soon, but what are friends for if to not share your cool results with in advance. :)

As to what it is, this is a series of radio images of Supernova 1987A spanning about 25 years. It is the closest and brightest supernova to us since the invention of the telescope, which occurred about 170,000 light years away from us in 1987. It has several rings of gas around it, which were not actually from the supernova itself (as I'd always assumed before I started working on this) but rather were ejected by the star itself in the tens of thousands of years or so before the supernova (no one's sure why, but current popular theory is because of a binary merger).

Anyway, the shockwave from the supernova is still spreading out at around 10% of the speed of light, and hit that innermost ring of material starting in about 2008. As this happens, magnetic fields are created, and what we see at 9 GHz in radio is basically the electrons spiraling around these magnetic fields (synchrotron radiation). This is cool because you can learn really accurately from radio just what the shockwave is doing, as well as trace material. Blue on this scale btw in the gif is faintest, and red then white is the most intense radio emission.

So my paper focuses on the data from 2013 on, and a lot of it has to do with stuff like modeling the radiation, and why the light is asymmetric from it (ie, brighter on the left then the right), and comparing it to other wavelengths. I should also note btw if you look at the gif I made, the cool thing that happens in the end if you look at the lower left area in 2016 and 2017, it's actually starting to get less bright! It turns out at all wavelengths (ie, Hubble data, Chandra X-ray data) the supernova shockwave has now left the ring of material- exiting first from this area- and we agreed as to when exactly this happened in all wavelengths. (Fun moment at a conference a few months ago, when there was a SN 1987A X-ray talk after mine. He said "what day did you estimate for the exit?" "Day 9,300 [from explosion] plus or minus 200." [head nod] "We got Day 9,200." [second head nod, we enjoy being in the geekiest SN 1987A club ever.) What radio is really good at is discovering the shockwave has also re-accelerated since it's left the ring of debris, so, go us!

Will post the paper here once it's online! I'm unfortunately having some errors getting it online onto the ArXiv- I swear, hardest part of science is getting past the errors on that thing.

TL;DR- This is a gif of radio emission from SN 1987A that I made, and it is very cool and teaches us a lot about the supernova!
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Sigma_Orionis » Thu Sep 06, 2018 11:32 am

Very Cool, you say the shockwave is moving away at 10% of the speed of light? So, the actual stuff the supernova ejected is being expelled that fast?
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Thumper » Thu Sep 06, 2018 11:33 am

Thanks for the explanation. I'm not sure I would have gathered all of that from the image. :P
Pretty cool stuff.
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Cyborg Girl » Thu Sep 06, 2018 1:59 pm

:wave:

This is amazing.

Thanks for mentioning the binary merger theory BTW - I remember reading in SciAm back in like 2000 about how weird this supernova was, and it's cool to hear about how the thinking on it has developed.
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby pumpkinpi » Thu Sep 06, 2018 2:02 pm

Congratulations, that's awesome!

If there is a SN1987A club, I'd love to consider myself a groupie. In my 18+ years now creating planetarium shows and searching for just the right object/image, it's been one of my favorites to use. This in particular is my favorite image of it aesthetically:

http://heritage.stsci.edu/1999/04/index.html

I'm so excited this is the object of your research! How did it become so?
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby SciFiFisher » Thu Sep 06, 2018 2:48 pm

I am wondering about the sheer amount of energy being spewed by that supernova. :o
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby geonuc » Fri Sep 07, 2018 12:23 am

Excellent.
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Rommie » Fri Sep 07, 2018 10:13 am

pumpkinpi wrote:Congratulations, that's awesome!

If there is a SN1987A club, I'd love to consider myself a groupie. In my 18+ years now creating planetarium shows and searching for just the right object/image, it's been one of my favorites to use. This in particular is my favorite image of it aesthetically:

http://heritage.stsci.edu/1999/04/index.html

I'm so excited this is the object of your research! How did it become so?


Hah, I use a better resolution version of that image as my title slide for 1987A talks! :)

Basically when Bryan and I were first going to start our work together, he listed a few projects that he is involved with that could work as PhD projects. I don't remember what the other ones were, except he said SN 1987A first and that kept my attention. Bryan in turn has been involved in this collaboration for like 20 years, and made some of the first radio images you see in that gif.
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Rommie » Fri Sep 07, 2018 10:15 am

SciFiFisher wrote:I am wondering about the sheer amount of energy being spewed by that supernova. :o


10^51 ergs is the amount of energy a supernova gives off. There is actually a unit for it.
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby pumpkinpi » Thu Sep 20, 2018 4:10 pm

Too bad ignorance isn't painful.
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Thumper » Thu Sep 20, 2018 5:00 pm

And I have to laugh at the timing of this. I recently saw a tweet by astrophysicist Yvette Cendes, saying she had published a research paper showing that the shockwave from the supernova is finally leaving that thick central ring behind.

So my thanks to soon-to-be Dr. Cendes for letting me know (and for citing my work in hers).
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Rommie » Thu Sep 20, 2018 8:02 pm

Omg. Living the nerd dream! :rockon:

(Thanks for sharing btw, I likely would have otherwise missed it!)
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Sigma_Orionis » Thu Sep 20, 2018 9:21 pm

Pretty cool :)
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Rommie » Thu Nov 01, 2018 7:40 pm

Paper got into the journal yesterday, so I got my first ever press release! :rockon:

Talked to journalists today at Gizmodo and Discover, so guess there will be a few pieces. Fun stuff. :)
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Thumper » Fri Nov 02, 2018 11:32 am

That is Awesome. 8-)
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby Sigma_Orionis » Fri Nov 02, 2018 11:52 am

YUP :)
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Re: SN 1987A!

Postby code monkey » Fri Nov 02, 2018 2:45 pm

it gets better and better! so happy for you!!
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