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Credit & Copyright: Stephane Vetter, Yann
Sainty
Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)
Explanation:
The ghosts of five supernovas haunt this extraordinary image.
It was acquired at Oukaömeden
Observatory in Morocco
with approximately 200 hours of observations and shows a large patch of the sky,
equivalent to the area
of one thousand full moons tiled together, in the constellation of Auriga
(the charioteer).
From left to right, the five supernova remnants visible across the field are
G181.1+9.5,
G182.4+4.3,
G179.0+2.6,
G180.0Á1.7
(Sh2-240, the Spaghetti Nebula),
and G178.2Á4.2.
They are highlighted in the annotated
image, together with open
cluster M37 and the Tadpole Nebula.
As each explosion expanded
into space, it created a growing shell of shocked gas and delicate filamentary
structures shown in red (hydrogen)
and blue (oxygen),
respectively.
These ancient stellar explosions happened independently; they are at various
distances up to about several thousands of light-years
away from Earth and have estimated ages up to tens
of thousands of years old.
Early
humans may have witnessed
them as bright new stars, fading over weeks or months.
Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II)
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Submissions.
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Based on Astronomy Picture
Of the Day