Estructure of Supernova 1987a Explosion Debris

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has obtained this photograph of the site of the stellar explosion supernova 1987A, the nearest in the last 400 years (167,000 light-years away from Earth), showing three rings.

One possibility is that the two rings might be "painted" by a high-energy beam of radiation or particles, like a spinning light- show laser beam tracing circles on a screen. Astronomers had expected to see an hourglass-shaped bubble being blown into space by the supernova's progenitor star. "The rings are probably on the surface of the hourglass shape," says Burrows.

Ten years now after the explosion, this cosmic fireball is large enough -- about one-sixth of a light-year in diameter -- to be resolved from the Earth's orbit with the Hubble Space Telescope. The debris is resolved into two opposing blobs and is dim in the center, as if the explosion was directed out of the plane of the central ring. The rings are probably composed of material lost by the pre-supernova star. The debris, expandig at nearly 6 million miles per hour, is expected to collide with the inner ring as early as the year 2002.

Full sized images can be downloaded from the original articles:

(C. Burrows. 19-5-1994):
HUBBLE FINDS MYSTERIOUS RING STRUCTURE AROUND SUPERNOVA 1987A

(Robert P. Kirshner. 14-1-1997):
Hubble Reveals Structure Of Supernova 1987a Explosion Debris.
Supernova Blast Begins Taking Shape.

Hubble's spectrograph chemically analizes the ring around supernova 1987A

The STIS (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) viewed a light-year wide ring of glowing gas around supernova 1987A, the nearest stellar explosion in 400 years, which occurred in February 1987. Each color represents light from specific elements in the ring's gasses, including oxygen (single green ring), nitrogen and hydrogen (triple orange rings), and sulfur (double red rings). The ring formed 30,000 years before the star exploded and so is a fossil record of the final stages of the star's existence. The light from the supernova heated the gas in the ring so that it now glows at temperatures from 5,000 to 25,000 degrees Kelvin. Supernova 1987A is located 167,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

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Invisible high-speed collision around supernova 1987A

 The STIS (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) spectrograph viewed the entire inner ring in far-ultraviolet light, spreading it into a spectrum. The middle panel shows the presence of glowing hydrogen expanding at a speed of 33 million miles per hour (15,000 kilometers per second) coming from an extended area inside the inner ring. In addition to hydrogen emission STIS also detected emission from high-velocity ionized nitrogen and from hot gasses (oxygen, nitrogen, and helium) coming from the inner ring itself.

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Veil's nebula

HUBBLE'S CLOSE-UP VIEW OF A SHOCKWAVE FROM A STELLAR EXPLOSION
(J. Hester. 20-2-1995)

 This picture shows a small fragment of the Veil's nebula. We see it here as it was about 15000 years after a supernova exploded in this place of the Cygnus constellation.

Changes in the Crab Pulsar

A new sequence of Hubble Space Telescope images of the remnant of a tremendous stellar explosion is giving astronomers a remarkable look at the dynamic relationship between the tiny Crab Pulsar and the vast nebula that it powers.

The colorful photo on the left shows a ground-based image of the entire Crab Nebula, the remnant of a supernova explosion witnessed more than 900 years ago. The nebula, which is 10 light-years across, is located 7,000 light-years away in the constellation Taurus.

At the center of the Crab Nebula lies the Crab Pulsar -- the collapsed core of the exploded star. The Crab Pulsar is a rapidly rotating neutron star -- an object only about six miles across, but containing more mass than our Sun. As it rotates at a rate of 30 times per second the Crab Pulsar's powerful magnetic field sweeps around, accelerating particles, and whipping them out into the nebula at speeds close to that of light.