SN 1987A!
Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2018 11:03 amSo 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!
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!
