Chronology of White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, and Supernovae
| 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. |
| 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. |