SN 1987A is catalogued in this registry as a supernova, held in the frame of Milky Way, from Supernovae (historical + landmark, curated).
Registry id SN1987A ·
source layer supernovae ·
provenance PROCESSED — derived deterministically from source catalogues (unit, frame and epoch conversions, cross-source reconciliation) — no value invented
Exists from -165661-04 30T04:45 UTC (JD -5.8785259302×10^7) — no end date is recorded.
Open SN 1987A in the live scene → The scene composes a position for any date and is where a figure becomes a picture. It downloads the whole catalogue first: measured against the built product, an object outside the core resolves after about 16 s over a local network and about 147 s over a 4 Mbit link, having transferred roughly 70 MB. If you cannot wait that long, this page is the answer.
| Kind | supernova |
|---|---|
| Origin | natural |
Supernova — witnessed. Type II-pec. Remnant: ring system + compact remnant (LMC). Distance ~51.4 kpc. Placed at the epoch the event HAPPENED, 170,000 years before its signal reached Earth (1987 CE), by removing its light-travel time (distance/c, exact at this redshift). The registry's default view is the absolute one, where every object sits where and when it really is; put an observer on Earth and the signal arrives on the catalogued date again. ARRIVAL DATE: the catalogued date of this event — the year humanity recorded — is when the LIGHT REACHED EARTH, not when the star exploded. at the catalogued distance the light took about 170,000 years to reach us, so the explosion preceded that date by about as much. The node itself is placed at the explosion, so an Earth-frame observer recovers the recorded date from the geometry. The nearest observed supernova since Kepler and the first with a detected neutrino burst (Kamiokande-II, IMB, Baksan) — the birth of neutrino astronomy. Progenitor: the blue supergiant Sanduleak −69°202 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. [Arnett et al. 1989]
Reproduced as the source wrote it. Author-year citations link to their DOI where one is registered.
These are absences in the catalogues aggregated here, not measurements of zero, and not statements that the quantity is unknown to science:
| Database | Supernovae (historical + landmark, curated) |
|---|---|
| Authority | Published astronomy (Williams 2011, Winkler 2003, Hester 2008, Ritter 2021, Krause 2008, Reynolds 2007, Perets 2011, Arnett 1989) — witnessed events |
| Licence | Public astronomical facts (positions/dates/types/distances) |
| How it entered | Curated data-as-code (src/ingest/catalogs/supernovae.ts) |
| Coverage | SN 185 · 1006 · 1054 (Crab) · 1181 · 1572 (Tycho) · 1604 (Kepler) · Cas A · 1885A (M31) · 1987A (LMC); each appears at its observed peak (A2) |
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