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Return to news story archive 24 August 2005 Supernova 1987A Decoded Supernova 1987A is the closest supernova event since the invention of the telescope. It was first seen in February 1987 in the nearby Magellanic cloud, a dwarf companion galaxy of the Milky Way, and only 169,000 light years from Earth. Close observation since 1987 has now provided proof t hat supernovae are catastrophic electrical discharges focused on a star. The two bright stars are just in the field of view and are not associated with the sup ernova. A supernova is one of the most energetic events witnessed in the universe . The accepted explanation is that it occurs at the end of a star's life time, or red giant stage, when the stars nuclear fuel is exhausted. The re is no more release of nuclear energy in the core so the huge star col lapses in on itself. If sufficiently massive, the imploding layers of th e star are thought to rebound when they hit the core, resulting in an explosion, and the blast wave ejects the star's envelope into interstell ar space. The bright equatorial ring is caused by the collision of explo ded matter from the star with the remnants of an earlier stellar "wind." The best that theorists have been ab le to manage is to postulate some kind of rotating beam from an assumed supernova remnant, sweeping and lighting up a shell of gas expelled at a n earlier epoch. The detection of a pulsar remnant after some supernovae is explained by t he implosion of the stellar core to produce a neutron star. Pulsars emit bursts of radiation up to thousands of times a second. It is believed t hat a pulsar must be a super-collapsed stellar object that can spin up t o thousands of times a second and emit a rotating beam of X-rays (like a lighthouse). Commonsense suggests that this mechanical model is wrong w hen some pulsars rev beyond the redline, even for such a bizarre object. A recent example of conventional thinking can be seen on the Chandra webs ite.
Challis Recent Chandra observations have revealed new details about the fiery rin g surrounding the stellar explosion that produced Supernova 1987A. The d ata give insight into the behavior of the doomed star in the years befor e it exploded, and indicate that the predicted spectacular brightening o f the circumstellar ring has begun.. The site of the explosion was trace d to the location of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak -69 202 (S K -69 for short) that had a mass estimated at approximately 20 Suns. Subsequent optical, ultraviolet and X-ray observations have enabled astro nomers to piece together the following scenario for SK -69: about ten mi llion years ago the star formed out of a dark, dense, cloud of dust and gas; roughly a million years ago, the star lost most of its outer layers in a slowly moving stellar wind that formed a vast cloud of gas around it; before the star exploded, a high-speed wind blowing off its hot surf ace carved out a cavity in the cool gas cloud. The intense flash of ultraviolet light from the supernova illuminated the edge of this cavity to produce the bright ring seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. In the meantime the supernova explosion sent a shock wave ru mbling through the cavity. In 1999, Chandra imaged this shock wave, and astronomers have waited expectantly for the shock wave to hit the edge o f the cavity, where it would encounter the much denser gas deposited by the red supergiant wind, and produce a dramatic increase in X-radiation. The latest data from Chandra and the Hubble Space Telescope indicate that this much-anticipated event has begun. Optical hot-spots now encircle t he ring like a necklace of incandescent diamonds. The Chandra image reve als multimillion-degree gas at the location of the optical hot-spots. X- ray spectra obtained with Chandra provide evidence that the optical hot- spots and the X-ray producing gas are due to a collision of the outward- moving supernova shock wave with dense fingers of cool gas protruding in ward from the circumstellar ring.
These fingers were produced long ago by the interaction of the high-speed wind with the dense circumstellar cloud. The collision of the outward-m oving supernova shock wave (yellow) with the dense fingers of cool gas p roduce bright spots (white) of optical and X-ray emission. The expanding debris (blue) of the exploded star lags behind the shock wave and, exce pt for a thin shell around the outer edge (gold), is too cool to produce X-rays. The dense fingers and the visible circumstellar ring represent only the i nner edge of a much greater, unknown amount of matter ejected long ago b y SK -69. As the shock wave moves into the dense cloud, ultraviolet and X-radiation from the shock wave will heat much more of the circumstellar gas. Then, as remarked by Richard McCray, one of the scientists involved in th e Chandra research, "Supernova 1987A will be illuminating its own past."
On the contrary, Supernova 1987A illuminates only how poorly the theory o f supernova explosions fits the observations. The official explanatory illustration above is conjectural and relies (ag ain) on invisible matter that the star is supposed to have conveniently pre-released in just the right places and filamentary form to produce th e observed effects. To say, the predicted spectacular brightening of th e circumstellar ring is disingenuous. Neither the presence of the three rings nor the pattern of bright beads in the equatorial ring was pred icted from theory. "The Hubble images of the rings are quite spectacular and unexpected," said Dr. Chris Burrows of the European Space Agency an d the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, when fir st discovered. The pattern of brightening is not explained by an expanding shock front. The star at the center was found to have been a blue supergiant. But a supernova explosion is thought to require a ten-times bigger red supergiant star. There is no evidence that SK -69 was a red supergiant star, emitting a massive stell ar wind. The history of the star is not based on observation, it is a fa brication required by the theory. The axial shape of SN1987A is that of a planetary nebula. Charles E R Bruce (1902-1979), argued that t he bipolar shape, temperatures and magnetic fields of planetary nebulae could be explained as an electrical discharge. Bruce was ideally situate d to make the discovery, being both an electrical engineer versed in hig h-energy lightning behavior and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Socie ty. The place to look for real answers is not in abstract astrophysical theor y but in the practical experiments and supercomputer simulations of some plasma cosmologists. They unleash the most powerful man-made electrical discharges on this planet. The ter m z-pinch comes from the usual representation of a current flowing alo ng the z-axis, parallel to the magnetic field. With a strong enough curr ent, the plasma formed by the discharge electromagnetically pinches in to a string of sausages, donuts and plasma instabilities, along the z-ax is .
IMAGE >> Electrical discharges (Lichtenberg figures) illuminate the surface of the Z machine, the world's most powerful X-ray source, during a recent a ccelerator shot. The most recent advance gave an X-ray power of about 29 0 trillion watts for billionths of a second, about 80 times the entire w orld's output of electricity.
Since Bruce, and following the pioneering work of Hannes Alfven on an ele ctric circuit model of stars, it has become clear to plasma cosmologists that the electrical z-pinch effect is instrumental in forming stars. On ce formed, stars continue to be lit by electrical power delivered throug hout the universe by cosmic transmission lines known as Birkeland curren t filaments. These giant filaments can be traced by their radio transmis sions. Stars also trace the Birkeland currents in galaxies in the same w ay that electric streetlights trace the routes of electrical cables. Stars are an electrical, not a thermonuclear, phenomenon. Consequently, a star's size, color and spectrum tell us nothing about its age. A red su pergiant star is huge because it is under low electrical stress. And being und...
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