Isn’t that a pretty picture? The circle of beads has been dubbed the string of pearls. At its center is the expanding debris of Supernova 1987A, the most intensely studied supernova, and quite possibly the most intensely studied single anything in the sky other than the Sun, in the history of astronomy. Roughly160,000 years after it blew up in the Large Magellanic Cloud, and 23 years after the signal of the closest supernova in recorded history reached Earth’s telescopes and neutrino observatories, it’s still making news.

The string of pearls is not news – they are knots of stuff that the progenitor star spat out long before it blew up, and for several years now have been lit up as shock waves from the explosion reach them. Farther out are additional rings showing the intersection of the blast with other material, also not newly found. But the image is arresting and helps dress up news in Science from an international team led by a U. Colorado-Boulder man. The team says the newly spiffed up Hubble Space Telescope has yielded fresh info on how the giant original star disassembled itself and sent violently expanding shards and layers of itself racing and rebounding into the rarefied interstellar medium – including into its pre-blast burps.

The report is not itself a major revision or advance in supernova theory. But it does underscore the astounding details that this event has given astronomers who previously had little but theory to tell them what happens when a giant star burns its last shred of fusable element – silicon – and undergoes the greatest irony in astrophysics by collapsing and exploding at the same time.

Oh yeah – this is the journalism tracker, so I’d get to journalism. Some reporters, and it’s hard to be surprised, seem unsure what is the news here.

Stories:

• NatureNews – Rhiannon Smith: ‘Lost years’ end for backyard supernova ; A savvy piece, telling a story of research process and progress without regarding the specifics as particularly more astounding than what 1987A already showed to astronomers.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Supernova blast wave could shape galaxy evolution ;  Ms. Chow recounts what supernovas are, very briefly, and that they throw heavy elements into space where they get incorporated into new stars, planets, etc. She writes little on what SN 1987a has added. Odd usage too – she reports the supernova was “first discovered” in 1987. An editor ought to have lined out the “first” as redundant. She also writes that it has been “studied for more than ten years,” a peculiarly constricted time span. It’s heaviest scrutiny came immediately after that discovery.
• Sky & Telescope – Kelly Beatty: Hubble Revisits Supernova 1987a ; A focus on one new discovery – that reverse shock waves, sort of like those waves that race back out to see from a steep beach – are making their way back toward the original explosion site.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: ‘Rock star’ spewed guts after emitting vast pearl necklace ; Once again varnishing his underlying enthusiasm for making  science a public amusement with lots of tweaky references to boffins (he even calls Science a “hefty boffinry mag,’ Page zips through this news quick. He may better have gone more slowly in describing the synthesis of heavy elements in supernovae. It’s true the strew them, but they don’t themselves, as he writes, make all of them. Manufacture of those beyond iron is in fact largely a job for Type II supernovae, as was this one, but lots of other  elements  beyond H and He,  up to iron, are constructed by the normal fusion burning sequence in heavy stars.
• Wired News UK – Duncan Geere: ‘Star guts’ pour out of decaying supernova ; A small niggle here. The team is not “at” CU Boulder; it’s members are all over including in Europe. In a short space Geere neatly connects this supernova with the process that provided our solar system, and out hemoglobin, with iron, oxygen, carbon…).
• Boulder Daily Camera – Brittany Anas: Hubble gives astronomers a glimpse of ‘star guts’ ; She tells readers that the string of pearls will, a home town astronomer expects, ‘grow and glom together” with time, a spritely phrase.

Grist for the Mill:

Paper Observing Supernova 1987A wih the Refurbished Hubble Space Telescope ; CU Boulder Press Release (source of the ‘star guts’ term in several accounts) ; HubbleSite Press Release ;

Other recent 1987A, gen’l supernova stories:

• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Supernova Explosions Offer Potential Spin on Life’s Origins ; about the chirality of biological proteins.
• Cosmos (Australia) Kate Heness: 3D map of supernova reveals wonky innards ;

Ancient Grist for the Mill:

This news dredges up many memories for me. In 1989 I rented a house near Santa Cruz and spent two weeks at a workshop at UCSC that noted supernova guru Stan Woosley hosted. I went there for the late, lamented magazine Mosaic that the NSF once published. As noted at this site before, thanks to friends of its now-retired editor,  Warren Kornberg, the articles are on line. If you have time and want to know how much was already known about 1987A shortly after it went off, here‘s how I saw it. Warren sure let his reporters write long.

- Charlie Petit

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