Stretching over 300 light-years from the supernova remnant
Space news (astrophysics: supernovae; Cassiopeia A remnant) – 11,000 light-years from Earth toward the northern constellation Cassiopeia the Queen –
On the day in 1667 when a brilliant new star appeared in the sky in Cassiopeia the Queen, no written account is left to tell of the stellar event. The supernova remnant left over is called Cassiopeia A. It consists of a neutron star, with the first carbon atmosphere ever detected, and an expanding shell of material that was ejected from the star as it contracted under its own mass. The progenitor star of this supernova remnant was a supermassive star estimated to be between 15 to 20 times as massive as Sol.
The composite image of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant seen above was made using six processed images taken over a three year period by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. It shows the largest light echoes ever detected at over 300 light-years in length, which were created as light from the explosion passed through clumps of dust surrounding the supernova remnant. This light illuminated and heated surrounding dust clumps, making them briefly glow in infrared, like a series of colored lights lighting up one after the other. This resulted in an optical illusion in which the dust appears to be traveling away from the remnant at the speed of light. This apparent motion is represented in this image by different dust colors, with dust features unchanged over time appearing gray, and changes in surrounding dust over time represented by blue or orange colors.
Supernova remnant Cassiopeia A is the brightest radio emission source in the night sky above the frequency of 1 Gigahertz. It’s expanding shell of material reaches speeds above 5,000 km/s and temperatures as high as 50 million degrees Fahrenheit. First detected by Martin Ryle and Francis Graham-Smith in 1948, since this time it has become one of the most studied supernova remnants during the human journey to the beginning of space and time.
The startling false-color image above shows the many brilliant, stunning faces of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. Composed of images collected by three of the greatest space observatories in history, in three different wavebands of light. This view highlights the beauty hidden within one of the most violent events ever detected close by in the Milky Way.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope infrared images used to create this stunning picture show warm dust in the outer shell of the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A highlighted in red. Hubble Space Telescope images added reveal delicate filaments of hot gas around 10,000 degrees Kelvin (18,000 degrees Fahrenheit) in yellow, while x-ray data collected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in green and blue. Look a little closer and deeper at the image and one sees hints of older infrared echoes from after the supernova hundreds of years ago.
Learn more about Cassiopeia A.
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View the cosmos in x-rays aboard NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.
Learn more about supernovae here.
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Learn and read about the incredible Polynesian islander navigators who used the stars, winds, current and other natural phenomena to colonize the islands of the Pacific Ocean tens of thousands of years ago.
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