01/09/2023
The remains of a star that exploded 36 years ago have fallen under the gaze of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — and this observatory's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) captured the expanding stellar debris in unprecedented resolution, revealing brand new details about this burgeoning supernova remnant.
The closest observed supernova since Kepler’s Supernova lit up the Milky Way in 1604, this star explosion was first identified in 1987 and is aptly known as Supernova 1987A.
It sits about 168,000 light-years away from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud and represents the destruction of a blue supergiant star called Sanduleak–69 202. Before it exploded, that star was thought to hold a mass about 20 times that of the sun.
