Some space pictures have become timeless symbols, like the famous picture of the Pillars of Creation, or Hubble's Deep Field Image, for example — this colorful picture of the Vela Supernova Remnant can be considered as impressive as them.
A big explosion happens when a star goes supernova.
The Vela Supernova Remnant is located about 800 light years away from us and is one of the closest remnants of this kind to Earth. It is the remains of a supernova, one of the biggest and most destructive events in the known universe. In this type of blast, a star violently expels its outer layers while its core collapses and forms a dense neutron star remnant. neutron star remnant. This event happened around 11,000 years ago, when humans were just starting to establish settlements.
When the star exploded, it released a massive shockwave that left behind a similarly massive trail as it passed through all the matter in its path. To get a sense of how huge this structure is, it’s a staggering 100 light-years across. Despite being so far away, it appears in our night sky with a diameter 20 times bigger than the moon. bigger than the moon. So, what we have here is the huge trail left behind by an explosion of cosmic scale.
The hot, pressurized gas pushed away everything in its path, leaving behind the colored tendrils we see in the image. But that’s not all. Although the star erupted so spectacularly, it didn’t disappear. It left behind a “zombie star”.
Neutron star
Certainly, it’s no longer a star in the traditional sense (it doesn’t create heat and light anymore), but the remaining matter collapsed into what is called a neutron star, one of the densest objects in the universe.
This neutron star has around the same mass as the sun, despite being only a few kilometers across — while the Sun is 1.4 million kilometers across. A single teaspoon of matter from such a neutron star would weigh about 10 million tons or as much as 2.5 million elephants.
This particular neutron star is a pulsar — a highly magnetized, rotating star that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation from its magnetic poles. The Vela Pulsar, which you can still see in the lower left corner of this image, is relatively dim and hard to distinguish from its much brighter neighbors. It’s spinning wildly fast, 11 times per second, still recoiling from the supernova. Imagine an object the mass of the sun, only as big as a mountain, rotating every 0.09 seconds. The cosmos creates some amazing things.
Dark energy camera
The image was taken with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), one of the best wide-field imaging instruments astronomers have available. The camera is mounted on the US National Science Foundation’s Victor M. Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tollolo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
The various colors in the picture were made by camera filters. Each filter gathers a specific light color. Astronomers took multiple photos like this and then put them on top of each other. This creates a large and very detailed photo; in fact, this is the biggest DECam photo, at 1.3 gigapixels. For comparison, that’s 1300 megapixels, and the average smartphone camera has between 12 and 48 megapixels.
More than just a galactic curiosity, this sighting is significant because it provides understanding of the life cycle of stars, the creation of neutron stars and pulsars, and the dynamics of supernova explosions. Like other classic space images, it adds to our comprehension of the universe’s development and makeup — while also being really fascinating to look at.
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