Supernova 1987As

Hot Spot Gets Hotter

Although more than a decade old, Supernova 1987A remains the subject of
active scrutiny. The star exploded within
an unusual and still poorly understood
set of rings, which predated the supernova but couldnt be seen until the
Hubble Space Telescope was launched
in 1990. Ten and a half years after the
supernova took place, expelled material
began to reach the innermost circumstellar ring, heating it and causing it to
glow in one spot (S&T: January 1998,
page 18). Recent Hubble and groundbased observations show that the hot
spot in SN 1987As central ring has
more than doubled in brightness since
it was first detected in 1997. However,
as Peter Garnavich (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) notes, no
other hot spots have appeared in the
latest Hubble views of SN 1987A. His research team made the announcement
in IAU Circular 7102. This bolsters the
notion that the existing hot spot is at
least 10 percent closer to the exploding
star than is the rest of the ring.

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A Hot Jupiter in Vela

In a February 2nd posting to an Internet bulletin board, Geneva Observatory astronomer Michel Mayor and his
colleagues announced their latest discovery: a possible planet in orbit
around HD 75289. Some 94 light-years
from Earth in the constellation Vela, HD
75289 is a type-G0 main-sequence star
at the edge of naked-eye visibility. By
repeatedly spreading its starlight out
into a finely dissected rainbow, Mayor
and his colleagues measured a series
of Doppler shifts for the 6th-magnitude, Sun-like star. Simple calculations
then revealed that HD 75289 is circled
every 3.5 Earth days by an unseen
body with at least 42 percent of the
mass of Jupiter the smallest value
inferred to date for an extrasolar planet by the Doppler-shift method. The
object and the star are separated by a
mere 7 million kilometers, suggesting
that HD 75289s unseen companion
may be a hot Jupiter, much like those
orbiting 51 Pegasi and four other nearby stars. The discovery was made with
a 1.2-meter reflector at La Silla, Chile.

1999 Sky Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Sky & Telescope June 1999

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