The first supernova visible to the naked eye in its 400-year history to have a nucleus was a neutron star – one of the most terrible object forms in the universe.
On February 24, 1987, astronomers captured an explosion of extremely bright stars occurring outside the galaxy containing the Milky Way. It was a supernova explosion so bright it could be seen with the naked eye from Earth.
According to Phys.org, scientists at NASA and many organizations and schools around the world have spent 34 years studying this exploding star to observe its evolution. Finally, data from NASA’s CHANDRA X-ray Observatory and Nuclear Spectroscopy Telescope (NuSTAR) and Chile’s ALMA Telescope reveal the most authentic details about the world to come: the super blast Nova SN 1987A.
According to Professor Emanuele Greco of the University of Palermo (Italy), the principal researcher, a neutron star was born in the middle of an explosion. To find it, they sifted through the messy data of stellar debris for more than three decades.
More unexpectedly, they discovered that the neutron star appeared to emit more energy than expected, suggesting that it could be a pulsar. The pulsar is a rapidly rotating, highly magnetized neutron star that produces beams of radiation similar to beacons and energetic stellar winds, which can be detected as a beautiful plusar nebula.
The Astrophysical Journal publication says they expect that in about 10 years the pulsar’s emission will become clearer, helping to confirm the existence of the special neutron star.
The neutron star can be understood as an energetic form of a star. When a star like the Sun lacks energy, it swells to form a red giant, then collapses once into a smaller, more energetic white dwarf. The white dwarf continues to evolve and then dies a second time in a supernova explosion, which could lead to the birth of a neutron star, only 10-20 km in radius, but extremely energetic and one of the most powerful in the universe.
