“After following supernovae and searching for compact objects for more than three decades, it is exciting to finally find the missing evidence for a neutron star,” said lead author Claes Fransson, professor of astrophysics at Stockholm University in Sweden, to JWST. Thank you.” According to the study published in Science Journal.
“Neutron stars are extremely dense compact remnants of the explosion of a massive star,” said study co-author Patrick Kavanagh, a lecturer in the department of experimental physics at Maynooth University in Ireland. “This is equivalent to compressing the entire mass of the Sun into the size of a city. They are so dense that a tablespoon of neutron star could weigh as much as a mountain.”
This supernova, called Supernova 1987A, originated 160,000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy neighboring our Milky Way. A light year is the distance that light travels in one year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km). Due to its large mass, the star had a lifetime of about 20 million years, much shorter than that of our Sun.