Mystery Star 1054

Mercury, July/August 2004 Table of Contents

Courtesy of ESO

by Yaël Nazé

It all began like any ordinary day. But suddenly, the sky changed with the appearance of a new star. Men and women raised their heads, shaking with fear. The sky should not change, they cried—this must be a sign of the gods! We are doomed: this guest in our sky can only bring plague and disaster.

This is probably how our ancestors felt on a clear day in year 1054 of the Common Era. Today's astronomers would probably do anything to witness such an event: a bright new star visible in daylight. Of course we now know that stars evolve and that the most massive of them die in incredible explosions of light called supernovae. We have seen such things in several places of the Universe, even one in 1987 as relatively nearby as the Large Magellanic Cloud, but never one so close as that of 1054. And because we can not travel back through time, we are left to concentrate on accounts by Middle Age skywatchers of that bright, 11th-century supernova.

The "1054 fever" began in 1928, when Edwin Hubble had yet another brilliant idea. Using the expansion velocity of Messier 1, the Crab Nebula, he deduced that it was born 900 years ago. This approximate birthdate corresponded well with the appearance of a "guest star" reported by the Chinese in 1054. Nowadays, we possess several texts describing the appearance of the same supernova, but do they all agree? And when exactly did the supernova explode?

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