History of supernova observation
[9] The gaseous shell RCW 86 is suspected as being the remnant of this event, and recent X-ray studies show a good match for the expected age.
Over a span of about 2,000 years, Chinese astronomers recorded a total of twenty such candidate events, including later explosions noted by Islamic, European, and possibly Indian and other observers.
This was the brightest recorded star ever to appear in the night sky, and its presence was noted in China, Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Japan and Switzerland.
It may also have been recorded, along with other supernovae, by the Ancestral Puebloans in present day New Mexico as a four pointed star shaped petroglyph.
[18] The event had been under discussion for long time[7][6][19] but in 2021 another candidate was proposed for the remnant, the recently discovered nebula Pa 30 which has been found to be about 1000 years old.
[8] The Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe was noted for his careful observations of the night sky from his observatory on the island of Hven.
[20] A common belief in Europe during this period was the Aristotelian idea that the cosmos beyond the Moon and planets was immutable (unchanging over time), so observers argued that the phenomenon was something in the Earth's atmosphere.
[21][22] He published his observations in the small book De nova et nullius aevi memoria prius visa stella (Latin for "Concerning the new and previously unseen star") in 1573.
This meant that S Andromedae, which did not just lie along the line of sight to the galaxy but had actually resided in the nucleus, released a much greater amount of energy than was typical for a nova.
[29] Early work on this new category of nova was performed during the 1930s by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky at Mount Wilson Observatory.
[30] They identified S Andromedae, what they considered a typical supernova, as an explosive event that released radiation approximately equal to the Sun's total energy output for 107 years.
Using a 45-cm Schmidt telescope at Palomar observatory, they discovered twelve new supernovae within three years by comparing new photographic plates to reference images of extragalactic regions.
[40] The concept that rapid nuclear fusion was the source of energy for a supernova explosion was developed by Hoyle and William Fowler during the 1960s.
[42] The modern standard model for Type Ia supernovae explosions is founded on a proposal by Whelan and Iben in 1973, and is based upon a mass-transfer scenario to a degenerate companion star.
[43] In particular, the light curve of SN1972e in NGC 5253, which was observed for more than a year, was followed long enough to discover that after its broad "hump" in brightness, the supernova faded at a nearly constant rate of about 0.01 magnitudes per day.
[44] Through observation of the light curves of many Type Ia supernovae, it was discovered that they appear to have a common peak luminosity.
The appearance of this supernova was studied in "real-time", and it has posed several major physical questions as it seems more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit would allow.
By chance, a burst of X-rays was noticed while looking at galaxy NGC 2770, 88 million light-years from Earth, and a variety of telescopes were aimed in that direction just in time to capture what has been named SN 2008D.
"This eventually confirmed that the big X-ray blast marked the birth of a supernova," said Alicia Soderberg of Princeton University.
[67] Gray, her father, and a friend spotted SN 2010lt, a magnitude 17 supernova in galaxy UGC 3378 in the constellation Camelopardalis, about 240 million light years away.
[69] On November 15, 2010, astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory announced that, while viewing the remnant of SN 1979C in the galaxy Messier 100, they have discovered an object which could be a young, 30-year-old black hole.
NASA also noted the possibility this object could be a spinning neutron star producing a wind of high energy particles.
[70] On August 24, 2011, the Palomar Transient Factory automated survey discovered a new Type Ia supernova (SN 2011fe) in the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101) shortly after it burst into existence.
[75] A few weeks after a star exploded in the spiral galaxy NGC 2525 during the month of January 2018, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took consecutive photos for nearly a year of the resulting Type Ia supernova, designated as SN 2018gv.
The deployment of new instruments that can observe across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum, along with neutrino detectors, means that the next such event will almost certainly be detected.
[33] The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is predicted to discover three to four million supernovae during its ten-year survey, over a broad range of distances.
