• DOI:10.1126/science.1205983
• Corpus ID: 46458836

Herschel Detects a Massive Dust Reservoir in Supernova 1987A

@article{Matsuura2011HerschelDA,
  title={Herschel Detects a Massive Dust Reservoir in Supernova 1987A},
  author={Mikako Matsuura and Eli Dwek and Margaret Meixner and Masaaki Otsuka and Brian L. Babler and Michael J. Barlow and Julia Roman-Duval and Charles William Engelbracht and Karin M. Sandstrom and Masha Lakicevic and Jacco Th. van Loon and George Sonneborn and Geoffrey C. Clayton and Knox S. Long and Peter Lundqvist and Takaya Nozawa and Karl D. Gordon and Sacha Hony and Pasquale Panuzzo and Kiyoshi Okumura and Karl Anthony Misselt and Edward Montiel and Marc Sauvage},
  journal={Science},
  year={2011},
  volume={333},
  pages={1258 - 1261}
}

• M. Matsuura, E. Dwek, +20 authors M. Sauvage
• Published 7 July 2011
• Physics
• Science

The large amount of dust produced by this supernova may help explain the dust observed in young galaxies. We report far-infrared and submillimeter observations of supernova 1987A, the star whose explosion was observed on 23 February 1987 in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy located 160,000 light years away. The observations reveal the presence of a population of cold dust grains radiating with a temperature of about 17 to 23 kelvin at a rate of about 220 times the luminosity of the Sun. The intensity and spectral energy distribution of the emission suggest a dust mass of about 0.4 to 0.7 times the mass of the Sun. The radiation must originate from the supernova ejecta and requires the efficient precipitation of all refractory material into dust. Our observations imply that supernovae can produce the large dust masses detected in young galaxies at very high redshifts.