RIAU24.COM – The aftermath of a massive stellar death blast can be seen in this image released Monday (October 31) by the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which shows large strands of gas brilliantly exploded into space during a supernova.
Before exploding at the end of its life cycle, the star was believed to have at least eight times the mass of our sun.
It is located in our galaxy, the Milky Way, about 800 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation of Vela. A light year is the distance that light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
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The disturbing image shows a cloud of gas that resembles pink and orange tendrils in the filters used by astronomers, covering an expanse about 600 times the size of our solar system.
“The filament structure is the gas ejected by the supernova explosion, which created this nebula. We see the star’s internal material as it expands into space. When there is a denser portion, some of the supernova material is shaken with surrounding gas and creates various filamentous structures, “said Bruno Leibundgut, an ESO-affiliated astronomer.
The images show the rest of the supernova about 11,000 years after the explosion, Leibundgut said.
“Most of the bright material is due to the excited hydrogen atoms. The beauty of the image is that we can see firsthand what material is inside the star,” added Leibundgut.
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“The matter that formed over millions of years is now exposed and will cool for millions of years until it eventually forms new stars. These supernovae produce many elements – calcium or iron – which we carry in our bodies. This is a spectacular part of the stellar evolutionary path. “
The star itself was reduced after a supernova to a very dense rotating object called a pulsar. Pulsars are a type of neutron star, one of the most compact celestial bodies in existence. This spins 10 times per second.
The image represents a mosaic of observations made with a wide-field camera called OmegaCAM at the VLT Survey Telescope, held at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. Data for the image was collected from 2013 to 2016, he said. the ESO.
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