NASA Chandra Image: Supernova remnant MSH 11-62

A long observation with Chandra of the supernova remnant MSH 11-62 reveals an irregular shell of hot gas, shown in red, surrounding an extended nebula of high energy X-rays, shown in blue. 

Even though scientists have yet to detect any pulsations from the central object within MSH 11-62, the structure around it has many of the same characteristics as other pulsar wind nebulas. 

The reverse shock and other, secondary shocks within MSH 11-62 appear to have begun to crush the pulsar wind nebula, possibly contributing to its elongated shape. 

Note: the orientation of this image has been rotated by 24 degrees so that north is pointed to the upper left.

Image credit:  NASA/CXC/SAO/P. Slane et al.

NASA’s Spitzer space telescope: Silica (sand) in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A.

In 2007 NASA’s Spitzer space telescope found the infrared signature of silica (sand) in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. 

The light from this exploding star first reached Earth in the 1600s.

The cyan dot just off center is all that remains of the star that exploded. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ O.Krause (Steward Observatory)

It's a bit like learning the secrets of the family that lived in your house in the 1800s by examining dust particles they left behind in cracks in the floorboards.

By looking at specks of dust carried to earth in meteorites, scientists are able to study stars that winked out of existence long before our solar system formed.

This technique for studying the stars – sometimes called astronomy in the lab—gives scientists information that cannot be obtained by the traditional techniques of astronomy, such as telescope observations or computer modeling.

Now scientists working at Washington University in St. Louis with support from the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences, have discovered two tiny grains of silica (SiO2; the most common constituent of sand) in primitive meteorites.

This discovery is surprising because silica is not one of the minerals expected to condense in stellar atmospheres—in fact, it has been called 'a mythical condensate.'

Five silica grains were found earlier, but, because of their isotopic compositions, they are thought to originate from AGB stars, red giants that puff up to enormous sizes at the end of their lives and are stripped of most of their mass by powerful stellar winds.

These two grains are thought to have come instead from a core-collapse supernova, a massive star that exploded at the end of its life.

Because the grains, which were found in meteorites from two different bodies of origin, have spookily similar isotopic compositions, the scientists speculate in the May 1 issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, that they may have come from a single supernova, perhaps even the one whose explosion is thought to have triggered the formation of the solar system.

A summary of the paper will also appear in the Editors' Choice compilation in the May 3 issue of Science magazine.

More information: 
AJL paper: iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/768/1/L17/

Supernova Explosion: Galaxy's Youngest Black Hole

W49B is much more barrel-shaped than most other remnants in X-rays and several other wavelengths, pointing to an unusual demise for this star.

The highly distorted supernova remnant shown in this image may contain the most recent black hole formed in the Milky Way galaxy. 

The image combines X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in blue and green, radio data from the NSF's Very Large Array in pink, and infrared data from Caltech's Palomar Observatory in yellow.

The remnant, called W49B, is about a thousand years old, as seen from Earth, and is at a distance of about 26,000 light years away.

The supernova explosions that destroy massive stars are generally symmetrical, with the stellar material blasting away more or less evenly in all directions.

However, in the W49B supernova, material near the poles of the doomed rotating star was ejected at a much higher speed than material emanating from its equator. Jets shooting away from the star's poles mainly shaped the supernova explosion and its aftermath.

By tracing the distribution and amounts of different elements in the stellar debris field, researchers were able to compare the Chandra data to theoretical models of how a star explodes.

For example, they found iron in only half of the remnant while other elements such as sulfur and silicon were spread throughout. This matches predictions for an asymmetric explosion.

Also, W49B is much more barrel-shaped than most other remnants in X-rays and several other wavelengths, pointing to an unusual demise for this star.

The authors also examined what sort of compact object the supernova explosion left behind. Most of the time, massive stars that collapse into supernovas leave a dense spinning core called a neutron star.

NSF VLA Image: Microquasar Makes a Giant Manatee Nebula

W50 supernova remnant in radio (green) against the infrared background of stars and dust (red). Credits: NRAO/AUI/NSF, K. Golap, M. Goss; NASA's Wide Field Survey Explorer (WISE).

A new view of a 20,000-year old supernova remnant demonstrates the upgraded imaging power of the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and provides more clues to the history of this giant cloud that resembles a beloved endangered species, the Florida Manatee.

W50 is one of the largest supernova remnants ever viewed by the VLA. At nearly 700 light years across, it covers two degrees on the sky - that's the span of four full Moons!

Aquila, exploded as a supernova around twenty thousand years ago, sending its outer gases flying outward in an expanding bubble.

The remaining, gravitationally-crushed relic of that giant star, most likely a black hole, feeds on gas from a very close, companion star. The cannibalized gas collects in a disk around the black hole.

The disk and black hole's network of powerful magnetic field lines acts like an enormous railroad system to snag charged particles out of the disk and channel them outward in powerful jets traveling at nearly the speed of light.

This system of a black hole and its feeder star shines brightly in both radio waves and X-rays and is known collectively as the SS433 microquasar.

Over time, the micro quasar's jets have forced their way through the expanding gases of the W50 bubble, eventually punching bulges outward on either side.

The jets also wobble, like an unstable spinning top, and blaze vivid corkscrew patterns across the inflating bulges.

NuSTAR X-Ray Telescope image: Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A

The supernova Cassiopeia A, as seen by the NuSTAR X-ray telescope

Image: DSS/JPL-Caltech/NASA

A space telescope has peered through dense dust and gas to produce the first images of the high-energy cosmos. These reveal two blazing black holes and a supernova remnant (see pictures, right).

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR, was launched into Earth orbit on 13 June. It can detect X-ray radiation at energies between 6 and 79 kilo electronvolts, well above the range of NASA's other orbiting telescopes, such as Chandra.

Such high-energy radiation can penetrate gas and dust, so NuSTAR sees through the galactic debris that blinds other telescopes.

On 7 January, Fiona Harrison of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, released the telescope's first images at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Long Beach, California.

One image (see picture, right) is of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A, which is about 11,000 light years from us. It shows never-seen-before high-energy X-rays emitted from extremely hot regions and from particles accelerated to within a fraction of the speed of light by the supernova's shock wave.

Astro-Photography: Cygnus Loop Filaments

As an end of the year finale, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and WIYN partners offer this new wide-field image of the Cygnus loop.

The Cygnus Loop is a large supernova remnant: the gaseous remains of a massive star that exploded long ago.

It is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

Astronomers estimate the supernova explosion that produced the nebula occurred between 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.

First noted in 1784 by William Herschel, it is so large that its many parts have been catalogued as separate objects, including NGC 6992, NGC 6995 and IC 1340 along the eastern (left) side of the image, NGC 6974 and NGC 6979 near the top-center, and the Veil Nebula (NGC 6960) and Pickering’s Triangle along the western (right) edge.

The bright star near the western edge of the image, known as 52 Cygnus, is not associated with the supernova.

The data were obtained with the NOAO Mosaic 1 camera, with observations in the Oxygen [OIII] (blue), Sulphur [S II] (green) and Hydrogen-Alpha (red) filters. 

NASA GALEX, Spitzer, WISE Image: Helix Nebula - Unraveling

A dying star is throwing a cosmic tantrum in this combined image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), which NASA has lent to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

In death, the star's dusty outer layers are unraveling into space, glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out by the hot stellar core.

This object, called the Helix nebula, lies 650 light-years away, in the constellation of Aquarius.

Also known by the catalog number NGC 7293, it is a typical example of a class of objects called planetary nebulae.

Discovered in the 18th century, these cosmic works of art were erroneously named for their resemblance to gas-giant planets.

Planetary nebulae are actually the remains of stars that once looked a lot like our sun.

These stars spend most of their lives turning hydrogen into helium in massive runaway nuclear fusion reactions in their cores.

In fact, this process of fusion provides all the light and heat that we get from our sun. Our sun will blossom into a planetary nebula when it dies in about five billion years.

When the hydrogen fuel for the fusion reaction runs out, the star turns to helium for a fuel source, burning it into an even heavier mix of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

Eventually, the helium will also be exhausted, and the star dies, puffing off its outer gaseous layers and leaving behind the tiny, hot, dense core, called a white dwarf.

The white dwarf is about the size of Earth, but has a mass very close to that of the original star; in fact, a teaspoon of a white dwarf would weigh as much as a few elephants!

The glow from planetary nebulae is particularly intriguing as it appears surprisingly similar across a broad swath of the spectrum, from ultraviolet to infrared.

The Helix remains recognizable at any of these wavelengths, but the combination shown here highlights some subtle differences.

The intense ultraviolet radiation from the white dwarf heats up the expelled layers of gas, which shine brightly in the infrared.

GALEX has picked out the ultraviolet light pouring out of this system, shown throughout the nebula in blue, while Spitzer has snagged the detailed infrared signature of the dust and gas in yellow

A portion of the extended field beyond the nebula, which was not observed by Spitzer, is from NASA's all-sky Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). The white dwarf star itself is a tiny white pinprick right at the center of the nebula.

The brighter purple circle in the very center is the combined ultraviolet and infrared glow of a dusty disk circling the white dwarf (the disk itself is too small to be resolved).

This dust was most likely kicked up by comets that survived the death of their star.

Before the star died, its comets, and possibly planets, would have orbited the star in an orderly fashion.

When the star ran out of hydrogen to burn, and blew off its outer layers, the icy bodies and outer planets would have been tossed about and into each other, kicking up an ongoing cosmic dust storm.

Any inner planets in the system would have burned up or been swallowed as their dying star expanded.

Infrared data from Spitzer for the central nebula is rendered in green (wavelengths of 3.6 to 4.5 microns) and red (8 to 24 microns), with WISE data covering the outer areas in green (3.4 to 4.5 microns) and red (12 to 22 microns). Ultraviolet data from GALEX appears as blue (0.15 to 2.3 microns).

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Simeis 147: Supernova Remnant 3000 light years away

Seen here is Simeis 147, the remains of a supernova 3000 light years away, which can be seen in the sky near Taurus. 

Forty thousand years ago, a massive star exploded as a supernova.

It left behind this debris, which is colliding with dust and gas as it continues to expand. 

(Image: Rogelio Bernal Andreo)