Abstract 

   Supernova 1987A in the Large Magellanic Cloud is the brightest supernova to be observed since SN1604 (Kepler). Observations taken with almost every type of telescope, on the ground and in space, have yielded a rich story of the evolution of the explosion debris and its interaction with its circumstellar environment. It is a unique laboratory of almost all kinds of physics, at temperatures ranging from 109 K to 20 K and densities ranging from 1015 to 10-23 g cm-3. After a brief  review of the physics of SN1987A, I’ll describe what we are learning from our recent observations with the Hubble Space Telescope and the newly commissioned Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). I’ll conclude with a summary of the outstanding mysteries of SN1987A and the prospects for unraveling them.  Prof. Richard McCray received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from UCLA in 1967. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech (1967-68) and an Assistant Professor at the Harvard College Observatory (1968-71). In 1971, he moved to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he became George Gamow Distinguished Professor of Astrophysics. In 2013 he moved to Berkeley, where he is a Visiting Scholar in the UC Berkeley Astronomy Department. Awards and recognition: Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship(1983), Dannie S. Heinemann Prize for Astrophysics of the American Physical Society (1990), member of National Academy of Sciences(1989), Concurrent Professor of Astronomy at Nanjing University(1996), National Science Foundation Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars(2002).