Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS April Meeting 2017
Volume 62, Number 1
Saturday–Tuesday, January 28–31, 2017; Washington, DC
Session K15: SN 1987A: 30 Years LaterFocus Invited
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Sponsoring Units: DAP DNP Chair: Fiona Harrison, California Institute of Technology Room: Washington 2 |
Sunday, January 29, 2017 1:30PM - 2:06PM |
K15.00001: Supernova 1987A: The Supernova of a Lifetime Invited Speaker: Robert Kirshner Supernova 1987A, the brightest supernova since Kepler's in 1604, was detected 30 years ago at a distance of 160 000 light years in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. Visible with the naked eye and detected with the full range of technology constructed since Kepler's time, SN 1987A has continued to be a rich source of empirical information to help understand supernova explosions and their evolution into supernova remnants. While the light output has faded by a factor of 10 000 000 over those 30 years, instrumentation, like the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the Atacama Large Millimeter Array has continued to improve so that this supernova continues to be visible in X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared light and in radio emission. In this review, I will sketch what has been learned from these observations about the pre-supernova star and its final stages of evolution, the explosion physics, the energy sources for emission, and the shock physics as the expanding debris encounters the circumstellar ring that was created about 20 000 years before the explosion. Today, SN 1987A is making the transition to a supernova remnant--- the energetics are no longer dominated by the radioactive elements produced in the explosion, but by the interaction of the expanding debris with the surrounding gas. While we are confident that the supernova explosion had its origin in gravitational collapse, careful searches for a compact object at the center of the remnant place upper limits of a few solar luminosities on that relic. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, January 29, 2017 2:06PM - 2:42PM |
K15.00002: X-ray studies of Remnants of Core-Collapse Supernovae Invited Speaker: Laura Lopez Supernovae (SNe) play an essential role in the Universe, and they are detected routinely through dedicated surveys. However, most of these SNe are often too distant (1-100 Mpc) to resolve the SN ejecta and immediate surroundings of the exploded stars. Fortunately, supernova remnants (SNRs), including SN 1987A, offer the means to study explosions and dynamics at sub-pc scales. SNRs are observable for up to 100,000 years after the explosions across the electromagnetic spectrum, and almost 400 SNRs have now been identified in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. In this talk, I will review recent advances in the understanding of core-collapse (CC) SNe based on studies of X-ray studies of SNRs. In particular, I will focus on SN 1987A and other young CC SNRs, highlighting investigations of their explosion (a)symmetries, heavy metal (like iron and titanium) abundances, progenitors, and particle acceleration. [Preview Abstract] |
Sunday, January 29, 2017 2:42PM - 2:54PM |
K15.00003: What we have learned about core collapse since 1987A Sean Couch tbd [Preview Abstract] |
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