After 30 years, this supernova is still sharing secrets
Ian Shelton was alone at a telescope in the remote Atacama Desert of Chile. He had spent three hours taking a picture of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
This wispy galaxy orbits our own, the Milky Way. Suddenly, Shelton was plunged into darkness. High winds had taken hold of the rolltop door in the observatory’s roof, slamming it shut.
He grabbed an 8-by-10 inch glass plate from the telescope’s camera. It had caught an image of the night sky. But it was only a negative. So Shelton headed off to the darkroom. (Back then, photographs had to be developed by hand from negatives instead of appearing instantly on a screen.) As a quick quality check, the astronomer compared the just-developed picture with one he had taken the night before.
And one star caught his eye. It hadn’t been there the previous night. “This is too good to be true,” he thought. But to be sure, he stepped outside and looked up. And there it was — a faint point of light that wasn’t supposed to be there.
He walked down the road to another telescope. There, he asked astronomers what they could say about an object that bright appearing in the Large Magellanic Cloud, just outside the Milky Way.
After 30 years, this supernova is still sharing secrets. This artist’s illustration of SN 1987A depicts what the exploding star may have looked like from a position much closer than Earth. Breaking News, Science, local news
This wispy galaxy orbits our own, the Milky Way. Suddenly, Shelton was plunged into darkness. High winds had taken hold of the rolltop door in the observatory’s roof, slamming it shut.
After 30 years, this supernova is still sharing secrets. This artist’s illustration of SN 1987A depicts what the exploding star may have looked like from a position much closer than Earth.“This was maybe telling me I should just call it a night,” recalls Shelton. It was February 23, 1987. And that evening, Shelton was the telescope operator at Las Campanas Observatory.
He grabbed an 8-by-10 inch glass plate from the telescope’s camera. It had caught an image of the night sky. But it was only a negative. So Shelton headed off to the darkroom. (Back then, photographs had to be developed by hand from negatives instead of appearing instantly on a screen.) As a quick quality check, the astronomer compared the just-developed picture with one he had taken the night before.
And one star caught his eye. It hadn’t been there the previous night. “This is too good to be true,” he thought. But to be sure, he stepped outside and looked up. And there it was — a faint point of light that wasn’t supposed to be there.
He walked down the road to another telescope. There, he asked astronomers what they could say about an object that bright appearing in the Large Magellanic Cloud, just outside the Milky Way.
After 30 years, this supernova is still sharing secrets. This artist’s illustration of SN 1987A depicts what the exploding star may have looked like from a position much closer than Earth. Breaking News, Science, local news
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