NASA telescopes start the year with a double bang

A colourful, festive picture exhibits several types of mild containing the stays of not one, however at the least two exploded stars. This supernova remnant is named 30 Doradus B (30 Dor B for brief) and is a component of a bigger area of space the place stars have been constantly forming for the previous 8 to 10 million years. It’s a complicated panorama of darkish clouds of fuel, younger stars, high-energy shocks, and superheated fuel, situated 160,000 light-years away from Earth within the Massive Magellanic Cloud, a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way.

The brand new picture of 30 Dor B was made by combining X-ray information from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple), optical data from the Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile (orange and cyan), and infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Area Telescope (purple). Optical information from NASA’s Hubble Area Telescope was additionally added in black and white to spotlight sharp options within the picture.

A workforce of astronomers led by Wei-An Chen from the Nationwide Taiwan College in Taipei, Taiwan, have used over two million seconds of Chandra observing time of 30 Dor B and its environment to investigate the area. They discovered a faint shell of X-rays that extends about 130 light-years throughout. (For context, the closest star to the sun is about 4 light-years away). The Chandra information additionally reveals that 30 Dor B incorporates winds of particles blowing away from a pulsar, creating what is named a pulsar wind nebula.

The paper led by Wei-An Chen describing these results was not too long ago printed within the Astronomical Journal. The co-authors of the paper are Chuan-Jui Li, You-Hua Chu, Shutaro Ueda, Kuo-Music Wang, Sheng-Yuan Liu, all from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics; Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan, and Bo-An Chen from Nationwide Taiwan College.

Taking the Chandra information along with information from Hubble and different telescopes, the researchers decided that no single supernova explosion might clarify what’s being seen. Each the pulsar and the brilliant X-rays seen within the middle of 30 Dor B probably resulted from a supernova explosion after the collapse of a large star about 5,000 years in the past. The bigger, faint shell of X-rays, nonetheless, is simply too huge to have resulted from the identical supernova.

As a substitute, the workforce thinks that at the least two supernova explosions happened in 30 Dor B, with the X-ray shell produced by one other supernova greater than 5,000 years in the past. Additionally it is fairly doable that much more occurred previously.

This end result can assist astronomers be taught extra in regards to the lives of huge stars, and the consequences of their supernova explosions.