ESO captures the ghost of a giant star

A spooky spider net, magical dragons or wispy trails of ghosts? What do you see on this picture of the Vela supernova remnant? This lovely tapestry of colours reveals the ghostly stays of a big star, and was captured right here in unbelievable element with the VLT Survey Telescope, hosted on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal website in Chile.

The wispy construction of pink and orange clouds is all that continues to be of a large star that ended its life in a robust explosion round 11,000 years in the past. When probably the most large stars attain the top of their life, they typically exit with a bang, in an outburst known as a supernova. These explosions trigger shock waves that transfer via the encompassing fuel, compressing it and creating intricate thread-like constructions. The vitality launched heats the gaseous tendrils, making them shine brightly, as seen on this picture.

On this 554-million-pixel picture, we get a particularly detailed view of the Vela supernova remnant, named after the southern constellation Vela (The Sails). You may match 9 full Moons on this total picture, and the entire cloud is even bigger. At solely 800 light-years away from Earth, this dramatic supernova remnant is likely one of the closest identified to us.

Because it exploded, the outermost layers of the progenitor star had been ejected into the encompassing fuel, producing the spectacular filaments that we observe right here. What stays of the star is an ultra-dense ball during which the protons and electrons are pressured collectively into neutrons—a neutron star. The neutron star within the Vela remnant, positioned barely exterior of this picture to the higher left, occurs to be a pulsar that spins by itself axis at an unbelievable velocity of greater than 10 occasions per second.

This picture is a mosaic of observations taken with the wide-field digital camera OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The 268-million-pixel digital camera can take pictures via a number of filters that allow via mild of various colours. On this explicit picture of the Vela remnant, 4 totally different filters had been used, represented right here by a mixture of magenta, blue, inexperienced and pink.

The VST is owned by The Nationwide Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, INAF, and with its 2.6-meter mirror it is likely one of the largest telescopes devoted to surveying the night time sky in seen mild. This picture is an instance from such a survey: the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Aircraft and Bulge (VPHAS+). For greater than seven years, this survey has mapped a substantial portion of our residence galaxy, permitting astronomers to raised perceive how stars kind, evolve and finally die.