Astronomy Now Online


Top Stories


Twin galaxies in cosmic arm wrestle

...astronomers at the Gemini Observatory have captured the early stages of gravitational interaction between two similar galaxies as they tug on each other’s spiral arms....

read more

SOHO discovers its 1,500th comet

...SOHO is celebrating the discovery of 1,500 comets since the mission began 13 years ago, making it more successful than all other comet discoverers throughout history put together....

read more

One hundred not out

...the impact event that rocked the unsuspecting Siberian outback 100 years ago today may hold the secrets to the protection of our precious blue planet against a similar cosmic assault in the future. ....

read more




Spaceflight Now +



Subscribe to Spaceflight Now Plus for access to our extensive video collections!
How do I sign up?
Video archive

STS-120 day 2 highlights

Flight Day 2 of Discovery's mission focused on heat shield inspections. This movie shows the day's highlights.

 Play

STS-120 day 1 highlights

The highlights from shuttle Discovery's launch day are packaged into this movie.

 Play

STS-118: Highlights

The STS-118 crew, including Barbara Morgan, narrates its mission highlights film and answers questions in this post-flight presentation.

 Full presentation
 Mission film

STS-120: Rollout to pad

Space shuttle Discovery rolls out of the Vehicle Assembly Building and travels to launch pad 39A for its STS-120 mission.

 Play

Dawn leaves Earth

NASA's Dawn space probe launches aboard a Delta 2-Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral to explore two worlds in the asteroid belt.

 Full coverage

Dawn: Launch preview

These briefings preview the launch and science objectives of NASA's Dawn asteroid orbiter.

 Launch | Science

Become a subscriber
More video



The stars and stripes of the Universe
BY DR EMILY BALDWIN
ASTRONOMY NOW

Posted: July 2, 2008

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a delicate ribbon of gas floating eerily in our Galaxy, a ghostly reminder of a supernova explosion that occurred over 1,000 years ago, and which is still expanding at almost 10 million kilometres per hour today.

SN 1006 resides within our Milky Way Galaxy, located more than 14 degrees off the plane of the Galaxy's disc. The supernova would have occurred far off the lower right corner of the image, and the motion is toward the upper left. The image is a composite of hydrogen-light observations taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys, and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 observations in blue, yellow-green, and near-infrared light. The supernova remnant is visible only in the hydrogen-light filter and is assigned a red hue in this image. Image: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA); W. Blair (Johns Hopkins University).

Unbeknown at the time to ancient observers of the year

1,006 A.D, the arrival of a bright light in the sky marked the explosion of a white dwarf star located 7,000 light years away. The supernova became the most prominent feature in the night sky for several weeks, after the Moon, and records suggest that it remained visible to the naked eye for at least two and a half years before fading away.

It wasn’t until the mid 1960s, however, that radio astronomers first detected a nearly circular ring of material at the recorded position of the supernova almost 30 arcminutes across, the same angular diameter as the full moon. Some quick calculations revealed that the supernova remnant had expanded at around 32 million kilometres per hour since the explosion occurred.

In 1976, the first detection of exceedingly faint optical emission of the supernova remnant was reported, but only for a filament on the northwest edge of the radio ring, a tiny portion of which is revealed in detail in the new Hubble image. The twisting ribbon of light seen by Hubble corresponds to locations where the expanding blast wave from the supernova is now sweeping into very tenuous surrounding gas.

The hydrogen gas heated by this fast shock wave emits radiation in visible light, providing astronomers with a detailed snapshot of the actual position and geometry of the shock front at any given time. Bright edges within the ribbon correspond to places where the shock wave is seen exactly edge on to our line of sight.

Today we know that SN 1006 has a diameter of nearly 60 light years, and that it is still expanding at roughly 10 million kilometres per hour. Even at this tremendous speed, however, it takes observations separated by several years to see significant outward motion of the shock wave against the grid of background stars and galaxies, which in the image shown here are represented by white flecks and orange ellipses respectively.

This composite image shows the whole extent of SN 1006 comprising X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical data from the University of Michigan's 0.9 metre Curtis Schmidt telescope at the NSF's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO; yellow) and the Digitized Sky Survey (orange and light blue), plus radio data from the NRAO's Very Large Array and Green Bank Telescope (VLA/GBT; red). The Hubble 'ribbon' is a close up of the region in the upper right of this image.