ExploraTour: A Peek into the Lives of the Stars
Hubble view of the remnants of supernova 1987A, almost a decade later.
The stellar remnant at the center of the rings is a neutron star about 20 km in diameter with a mass comparable to the mass of our sun.
Rather than being just an expanding shell, the gas cloud around supernova 1987a is very complicated. This is thought to be evidence that the star that became supernova 1987A was part of a double star system. The gravitational attraction of the companion star caused the expanding gas shell to become highly structure.