Puppis A: Supernova remnant seen in Two LIghts

Credit: NASA/ESA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC/IAFE

The destructive results of a mighty supernova explosion reveal themselves in a delicate blend of infrared and X-ray light, as seen in this image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Chandra X-Ray Observatory, and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton.

The bubbly cloud is an irregular shock wave, generated by a supernova that would have been witnessed on Earth 3,700 years ago.

The remnant itself, called Puppis A, is around 7,000 light-years away, and the shock wave is about 10 light-years across.

The pastel hues in this image reveal that the infrared and X-ray structures trace each other closely.

Warm dust particles are responsible for most of the infrared light wavelengths, assigned red and green colours in this view.

Material heated by the supernova’s shock wave emits X-rays, which are colored blue.

Regions where the infrared and X-ray emissions blend together take on brighter, more pastel tones.

The shock wave appears to light up as it slams into surrounding clouds of dust and gas that fill the interstellar space in this region.

From the infrared glow, astronomers have found a total quantity of dust in the region equal to about a quarter of the mass of our sun.

Data collected from Spitzer’s infrared spectrograph reveal how the shock wave is breaking apart the fragile dust grains that fill the surrounding space.

Supernova explosions forge the heavy elements that can provide the raw material from which future generations of stars and planets will form.

Studying how supernova remnants expand into the galaxy and interact with other material provides critical clues into our own origins.

Infrared data from Spitzer’s multiband imaging photometer (MIPS) at wavelengths of 24 and 70 microns are rendered in green and red.

X-ray data from XMM-Newton spanning an energy range of 0.3 to 8 kiloelectron volts are shown in blue.

NASA Spitzer: Cosmic Clumps Cast the Darkest Shadows

Astronomers have found cosmic clumps so dark, dense and dusty that they throw the deepest shadows ever recorded.

Image credit: NASA /JPL-Caltech /University of Zurich

The clumps were discovered within a huge cosmic cloud of gas and dust. Infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of these blackest-of-black regions in the cloud paradoxically light the way to understanding how the brightest stars form.

The large cloud looms in the center of this image of the galactic plane from Spitzer. The zoom oval to the right shows details of the cloud, revealing the dense clumps.

A new study takes advantage of the shadows cast by these dark clumps to measure the cloud's overall structure and mass.

These dense, clumpy pockets of star-forming material within the cloud are so thick with dust that they scatter and block not only visible light, but almost all background infrared light as well.

"The map of the structure of the cloud and its dense cores we have made in this study reveals a lot of fine details about the massive star and star cluster formation process," said Michael Butler, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and lead author of the study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The dusty cloud, the results suggest, will likely evolve into one of the most massive young clusters of stars in our galaxy.

The densest clumps will blossom into the cluster's biggest, most powerful stars, called O-type stars, the formation of which has long puzzled scientists.

These hulking stars have major impacts on their local stellar environments while also helping to create the heavy elements needed for life.

The blue callout image reveals the overall darkness of the cloud, calculated using Spitzer’s infrared observations at a wavelength of 8 microns. Artifacts left by individual stars have been removed from the data.

The background image combines data from Spitzer surveys. Blue represents 3.6-micron light and green shows light of 8 microns, both captured by Spitzer's infrared array camera.

Red is 24-micron light detected by Spitzer's Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS). The red spot in the center of the zoom oval, unrelated to the new study's findings, is a young star whose radiating heat has lit up a surrounding cocoon of dust.

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