Skip to main content

Hubble Spots Expanding Light Echo around Supernova

Light Echo around SN 2014J in M82. Credits NASA, ESA, and Y. Yang (Texas A&M University and Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel). Acknowledgment: M. Mountain (AURA) and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

 Light from a supernova explosion in the nearby starburst galaxy M82 is reverberating off a huge dust cloud in interstellar space.

 The supernova, called SN 2014J, occurred at the upper right of M82, and is marked by an “X.” The supernova was discovered on Jan. 21, 2014. 

 The inset images at top reveal an expanding shell of light from the stellar explosion sweeping through interstellar space, called a “light echo.” The images were taken 10 months to nearly two years after the violent event (Nov. 6, 2014 to Oct. 12, 2016). The light is bouncing off a giant dust cloud that extends 300 to 1,600 light-years from the supernova and is being reflected toward Earth.

 SN 2014J is classified as a Type Ia supernova and is the closest such blast in at least four decades. A Type Ia supernova occurs in a binary star system consisting of a burned-out white dwarf and a companion star. The white dwarf explodes after the companion dumps too much material onto it.

 The image of M82 reveals a bright blue disk, webs of shredded clouds, and fiery-looking plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out of its central regions. 

 Close encounters with its larger neighbor, the spiral galaxy M81, is compressing gas in M82 and stoking the birth of multiple star clusters. Some of these stars live for only a short time and die in cataclysmic supernova blasts, as shown by SN 2014J.
A light echo occurs because light from the stellar blast travels different distances to arrive at Earth. Some light comes to Earth directly from the supernova blast. Other light is delayed because it travels indirectly. In this case, the light is bouncing off a huge dust cloud that extends 300 to 1,600 light-years around the supernova and is being reflected toward Earth. Credits: NASA, ESA, and Y. Yang (Texas A&M / Weizmann Institute of Science)
Located 11.4 million light-years away, M82 appears high in the northern spring sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It is also called the “Cigar Galaxy” because of the elliptical shape produced by the oblique tilt of its starry disk relative to our line of sight.

 The M82 image was taken in 2006 by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. The inset images of the light echo also were taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys.



Credits

NASA, ESA, and Y. Yang (Texas A&M University and Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel). Acknowledgment: M. Mountain (AURA) and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Resources

Light Echo around SN 2014J in M82

Hubble Movie Shows Movement of Light Echo Around Exploded Star


Next Post


Forest of Molecular Signals in Star Forming Galaxy

Etichette:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ORBITAL PERIODS OF THE PLANETS

For orbital period generally we refer to the sidereal period, that is the temporal cycle that it takes an object to make a full orbit, relative to the stars. This is the orbital period in an inertial (non-rotating) frame of reference (365,25 days for the earth).
Post a Comment
Read more

CONSTRAINTS ON THE LOCATION OF A POSSIBLE 9TH PLANET

Image: The six most distant known objects in the solar system with orbits exclusively beyond Neptune (magenta) all mysteriously line up in a single direction. Such an orbital alignment can only be maintained by some outside force, Batygin and Brown say. Their paper argues that a planet with 10 times the mass of the earth in a distant eccentric orbit anti-aligned with the other six objects (orange) is required to maintain this configuration. Credit: Caltech The astronomers have noticed some of the dwarf planets and other small, icy objects tend to follow orbits that cluster together. To explain the unusual distribution of these Kuiper Belt objects, several authors have advocated the existence of a superEarth planet in the outer solar system ( planet Nine or planet X ).
1 comment
Read more

RADIATIVE CLEARING OF PROTOPLANETARY DISCS

Image: protoplanetary disc surrounding the young star HL Tauri, a very young T Tauri star in the constellation Taurus, approximately 450 light-years (140 pc) from Earth in the Taurus Molecular Cloud. These new ALMA observations reveal substructures within the disc that have never been seen before and even show the possible positions of planets forming in the dark patches within the system. Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO) T Tauri stars are pre-main-sequence stars in the process of contracting to the main sequence. Their central temperatures are too low for hydrogen fusion. Instead, they are powered by gravitational energy released as the stars contract, while moving towards the main sequence, which they reach after about 100 million years. Roughly half of T Tauri stars have circumstellar disks, which in this case are called protoplanetary discs because they are probably the progenitors of planetary systems like the Solar System.
Post a Comment
Read more