Ebook: Supernovae

For millennia mankind has watched as the heavens move in their stately progression from night to night and from year to year, presaging with their changes the changing seasons. The sun, the moon, and the planets move in what appears to be an unchanging firmament, except occasionally when a new "star" appears. Among the new stars there are comets, novae, and finally supernovae, the subject of this book. Superstitious mankind regarded these events as significant portents and recorded them carefully so that we have records of supernovae that may reach back as far as 1300 B. C. (Clark and Stephenson, 1977; Murdin and Murdin, 1985). The Cygnus Loop, believed to be a 15,000-year-old supernova remnant at a distance of only 800 pc (Chevalier and Seward, 1988), must have awed our ancestors. Tycho's supernova of 1572, at a distance of 2500 pc, had a magnitude of -4. 0, comparable to Venus at its brightest, and Kepler's supernova of 1604 had a magnitude of - 3 or so. Thus the Cygnus Loop supernova might have had a magnitude of - 6 or so, and should have been readily visible in daytime. A supernova in Vela, about 8000 B. C. was comparably close, as was SN 1006, whose magnitude may have been -9. While most of the supernova records come from the Old World, the supernova of 1054 is recorded in at least one petroglyph in the American West.

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This book offers an authoritative collection of papers incorporating the latest results and understanding about supernovae, including SN1987A. There are several chapters reviewing all the radio through infrared, visible, and ultraviolet to X-rays and gamma-rays but also neutrinos. Other chapters deal with the classification of supernovae, depending on their spectra and light curves. Three chapters treat supernovae theory, including a novel idea of a `fractal' burning front and another on the behavior of neutron stars. This thorough review of supernovae observations and theory will appeal to observers as well as theorists in astronomy and astrophysics.