Filaments of the Vela Supernova Remnant
From
NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day
How to follow APOD if the US
government shuts down. EDITOR'S NOTE: These Astronomy Picture of the Day posts were down-loaded before the government shut-down.
The explosion is
over but the consequences continue. About eleven thousand years ago a star in
the constellation of Vela could be
seen to explode,
creating a strange point of light briefly visible to humans living near the
beginning of recorded
history.
The outer layers
of the star crashed into the interstellar medium, driving
a shock wave that
is still visible today. A roughly spherical, expanding shock wave is visible in X-rays.
The image
below captures some of that filamentary and gigantic shock in visible light. As gas
flies away from the detonated star, it decays and
reacts with the interstellar medium, producing light in many different colors
and energy bands.
Remaining at the
center of the Vela
Supernova Remnant is a pulsar,
a star as dense as nuclear matter that rotates completely around more than ten
times in a single second.
Image Credit & Copyright: Angus Lau, Y Van, SS Tong (Jade Scope Observatory)