Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Participants
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Observations of Supernovae and the Cosmic Distance Scale
- Type Ia Supernovae
- Type Ib and Type II Supernovae
- SN 1987A, SN 1993J, and Other Supernovae
- Supernovae and Circumstellar Matter
- Radio Supernovae
- The SN 1987A Environment
- Radio Emission from SN 1987A
- Interaction of Supernova Ejecta with Circumstellar Matter and X-Ray Emission: SN 1987A & SN 1993J
- Supernova Remnants
- Catalogues
- List of Contributed Papers
The SN 1987A Environment
from Supernovae and Circumstellar Matter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Participants
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Observations of Supernovae and the Cosmic Distance Scale
- Type Ia Supernovae
- Type Ib and Type II Supernovae
- SN 1987A, SN 1993J, and Other Supernovae
- Supernovae and Circumstellar Matter
- Radio Supernovae
- The SN 1987A Environment
- Radio Emission from SN 1987A
- Interaction of Supernova Ejecta with Circumstellar Matter and X-Ray Emission: SN 1987A & SN 1993J
- Supernova Remnants
- Catalogues
- List of Contributed Papers
Summary
The environment of the SN1987A is quite complex but also very regularly structured. Detailed analyses of direct images taken under good seeing conditions (0.3–0.8 arcsec) from the European Southern Observatory (ESO)'s New Technology Telescope (NTT) show that there are two nebular loops within the 3 arcsec environment of the SN. The inner loop is elliptical in shape. The kinematics of this loop as revealed by spectroscopic data with a spectral resolving power λ/Δλ ≈ 30000 provide further clues for the three dimensional structure of these two loops. The data show that the overall structure of the nebulosity can be understood by an hourglass-shaped shell with significant mass enhancement on its equatorial plane. A diffuse nebulosity called Napoleon's Hat is observed at a distance of about 5 arcsec to the north of the SN. It showed little size evolution since the first observation on Aug. 1989, until it disappeared on Jan, 1992. The Napoleon's Hat nebula appears to be a bow-shock coming from an interaction between the supernova progenitor's stellar wind and the interstellar medium, as the supernova progenitor moved through the interstellar medium with a velocity of around 5 km s−1. On an even larger scale, there is a huge dark bay of size around 100 arcsec in diameter, we suggested that this bay was also formed by interactions between the supernova progenitor and the interstellar medium.
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- Information
- Supernovae and Supernova RemnantsIAU Colloquium 145, pp. 299 - 308Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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