This waving mass of dust filaments and gas tendrils stretches for 100 meters. light years It is the Vela of space like delicate lace supernova remnant – scattered ashes of a star that exploded about 11,000 years ago.
The image was obtained by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the Victor M. Blanco 4 Meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. DECam was originally designed to survey long distances. galaxies to measure your strength dark energy It accelerates the expansion of the universe, pushing galaxies away from us. However, after the completion of this survey, DECam began to be used more generally. It is one of the most powerful wide-field instruments ever built, and this image of the Vela supernova remnant is a testament to its capabilities. In fact, this is the largest image ever released by the camera, measuring 1.3 gigapixels (1.3 billion pixels). For comparison, a premium smartphone might have a 48-megapixel (48 million pixels) camera.
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To capture all the detail over such a large area of the sky, the image needs to be large. As noted, the Vela supernova remnant is a nebula it is about 100 light-years in diameter. Being about 800 light-years away, this means that the Vela supernova remnant covers an area on the celestial sphere 20 times larger than the angular diameter of the full supernova. moon (this is 31 arcminutes or half a degree in the sky).
The Vela supernova remnant itself is of very significant astronomical importance. It gives us a good look at the final stages of the development of such a remnant and gives insight into how the material ejected by the supernova gradually disperses into the interstellar medium, the fine gas mist that fills the interstellar medium. space between stars. The shock wave from the ancient star explosion that formed the Vela supernova remnant is still expanding into space, where it collides with the interstellar medium and compresses it, creating the delicate filaments we can see in the image. Absorption lines of elements such as calcium, carbon, copper, germanium, krypton, magnesium, nickel, oxygen and silicon, most of which are ionized and doubly ionized, were also detected in the supernova debris. These are heavy elements that are forged by fusion processes inside the star before it explodes, or by the violent energies released by the explosion itself.
A supernova doesn’t just spray a star’s guts into deep space; it also leaves behind the dead star’s core; it is now trapped under gravity into an ultra-dense object just 10 or 12 kilometers (about 6 to 8 miles) in diameter. It’s called a neutron star.
Such an object is usually born spinning many times per second and emits radio beams from its poles like a cosmic lighthouse. We “name” such objectspulsars,” and indeed, at the heart of the Vela supernova remnant, radio telescopes appear to be spinning at a dizzying speed of 11 rotations per second.
The Vela pulsar is one of the closest pulsars to us and blows out what’s called a “pulsar wind nebula,” which is a smaller nebula inside the larger supernova remnant that consists of charged particles emitted from the pulsar and hitting surrounding material ejected by the destroyed star. star as well as the wider interstellar medium. In a way, the remnant and pulsar wind nebula are like a nebula within a nebula, like the cosmic Matryoshka doll. Given that it consists of energetic particles, a pulsar wind nebula tends to be more detectable in X-rays and gamma rays.
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Even the constellation in which the Vela supernova remnant is located has an interesting history. The constellation is Vela, the Sails, but this area of the sky was once part of a much larger constellation called Argo Navis; this is the name of the Greek mythological ship that took Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece. This southern constellation was large enough to be unwieldy, so in 1755 French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille divided Argo Navis into three smaller constellations: Keel Carina, Poop Deck (or stern) Puppis, and Sails Vela.
These three constellations still exist to this day, but judging by DECam’s image, perhaps after all the Argonauts – we astronomers – have indeed found our Golden Fleece in the form of the Vela Supernova Remnant.