Note that this list is mainly about the development of knowledge, but also
about some supernovae taking place.
- 1006 – The brightest (magnitude -9m)recorded supernova is observed in
the constellation of Lupus - 1054 – Chinese and American Indian astronomers observe the Crab
supernova explosion, - 1572 – Tycho Brahe discovers his supernova in Cassiopeia,
- 1604 – Johannes Kepler’s supernova in Serpens is observed,
- 1862 – Alvan Clark observes Sirius B,
- 1866 – William Huggins studies the spectrum of a nova and discovers
that it is surrounded by a cloud of hydrogen, - 1885 – A supernova is observed in the Andromeda Galaxy leading to
recognition of supernovae as a distinct class of novae - 1914 – Walter Adams determines an incredibly high density for Sirius B,
- 1926 – Ralph Fowler uses Fermi-Dirac statistics to explain white dwarf
stars, - 1930 – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar discovers the white dwarf maximum
mass limit, - 1933 – Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade propose the neutron star idea and
suggest that supernovae might be created by the collapse of normal
stars to neutron stars—they also point out that such events can
explain the cosmic ray background, - 1939 – Robert Oppenheimer and George Volkoff calculate the first
neutron star models, - 1942 – J.J.L. Duyvendak, Nicholas Mayall, and Jan Oort deduce that the
Crab Nebula is a remnant of the 1054 supernova observed by Chinese
astronomers, - 1958 – Evry Schatzman, Kent Harrison, Masami Wakano, and John Wheeler
show that white dwarfs are unstable to inverse beta decay, - 1962 – Riccardo Giacconi, Herbert Gursky, Frank Paolini, and Bruno
Rossi discover Sco X-1, - 1967 – Jocelyn Bell and Anthony Hewish discover radio pulses from a
pulsar, - 1967 – J.R. Harries, Ken McCracken, R.J. Francey, and A.G. Fenton
discover the first X-ray transient (Cen X-2), - 1968 – Thomas Gold proposes that pulsars are rotating neutron stars,
- 1969 – David Staelin, E.C. Reifenstein, William Cocke, Mike Disney, and
Donald Taylor discover the Crab Nebula pulsar thus connecting
supernovae, neutron stars, and pulsars, - 1971 – Riccardo Giacconi, Herbert Gursky, Ed Kellogg, R. Levinson, E.
Schreier, and H. Tananbaum discover 4.8 second X-ray pulsations from
Cen X-3, - 1974 – Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor discover the binary pulsar
PSR1913+16, - 1977 – Kip Thorne and Anna Zytkow present a detailed analysis of
Thorne-Zytkow objects, - 1982 – D.C. Backer, Shrinivas Kulkarni, Carl Heiles, M.M. Davis, and
Miller Goss discover the millisecond pulsar PSR1937+214, - 1985 – Michiel van der Klis discovers 30 Hz quasi-periodic oscillations
in GX 5-1, - 1987 – Ian Shelton discovers Supernova 1987a in the Large Magellanic
Cloud …