Word: sanduleak
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...star that exploded to create Supernova 1987A has been identified as Sanduleak-69 202, a blue supergiant whose position in the Large Magellanic Cloud neatly coincided with the supernova. Though Sanduleak was suspected, some astronomers, like Harvard's Robert Kirshner, at first thought that satellite data on the LMC showed the star still existed after the blast and thus could not have been the progenitor. Later other scientists examining the same evidence failed to locate SK-69 202. Admitted Kirshner last week: "It was that star that blew up -- no matter what you've heard elsewhere . . . from me." His colleagues...
...would Sanduleak, a blue supergiant, a star presumably in mid-life, collapse so violently? According to theory, only aging red supergiants, whose outer gaseous layers had turned from blue to red as they expanded and cooled, spawned this type of supernova. One hypothesis: SK-69 202, like other stars in the LMC, contained relatively little metal, which theorists now think may keep the outer shell of even older stars from expanding fully, thus making it glow blue rather than red as it plunged toward its thermonuclear crisis. Said University of Chicago Astrophysicist David Schramm: "It's clear that while...
...light. If he is right, gamma-ray emissions from decaying cobalt 56 should start showing up this summer. Concedes Woosley: "I'm out on a limb." A more radical theory, put forth by Princeton Astrophysicist Jeremiah Ostriker, proposes that the neutron star that formed at 1987A's center when Sanduleak exploded has turned into an extremely rapidly rotating pulsar that is leaking energy and illuminating the surrounding debris...
Perhaps the most confusing phenomenon of all is the discovery of a glowing companion to the supernova that is 100 times as bright as Sanduleak had been. Scientists are frankly stumped by its appearance. Two teams of astronomers, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and London's Imperial College, both using a technique known as optical speckle interferometry (quickly dubbed "that speckled thing"), fed data from telescopic observations into computers. What emerged was a composite picture that confounded everyone. Said Woosley: "It's easier to say what it isn't than what it is. It wasn't there before...
...object in the constellation Aquila (Eagle) that seems simultaneously to be hurtling toward and away from us. It is designated SS 433 because it was the 433rd object listed in a catalogue published a few years ago by Case Western Reserve Astronomers C. Bruce Stephenson and Nicholas Sanduleak. But it is also listed in a standard inventory of variable stars (whose light brightens and dims) as V1343 Aquilae. If the myriad catalogues are something of a hodgepodge, a semblance of order is maintained by the International Astronomical Union, the organization of the world's professional astronomers. The I.A.U...
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