Timeline of white dwarfs, neutron stars, and supernovae

Note that this list is mainly about the development of knowledge, but also about some supernovae taking place. For a separate list of the latter, see the section "Notable supernovae" in the article supernova.

• 1006 - The brightest (magnitude -9) 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 Sydney 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 - Donald Backer, Shrinivas Kulkarni, Carl Heiles, Michael 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 ...