ExploraTour: A Peek into the Lives of the Stars
Supernova 1987A.
These pictures show a star exploding. The explosion is called a supernova .
The pictures were taken about ten years ago on February 23, 1987. What you see is a section of a neighboring galaxy, called the Large Magellanic Cloud. In the first picture you can see the star before the explosion. It is not very bright. In the second picture, you can see the explosion. It is so bright that you could go out and see it in the night sky without a telescope. The supernova was so bright that it could easily be seen with the naked eye .
This was the first such explosion in some 384 years to be visible without a telescope. The supernova was a million times brighter than our sun if both objects would have been placed at the same distance from the Earth.
The explosion actually took place 170,000 years ago (about the time
Cavemen were living on Earth) but we did not see it until 10 years ago.
Light took all that time to reach the Earth from the place far away in deep
space where the star exploded.