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Combining X-ray data from @NASAChandraXray, optical data from @NASAHubble, and infrared data from the retired Spitzer Space Telescope, an international team of astronomers has “wound back the clock” to help determine the timeline of a distant star’s demise.
Located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy 160,000 light years from Earth, the supernova remnant is the debris from an explosion of a white dwarf star. After reaching a critical mass, either by pulling matter from a neighboring star or by merging with another white dwarf, the star underwent a thermonuclear explosion and was destroyed.
The researchers compared Hubble images of the area from 2010, 2011, and 2020 to measure the speeds of material in the blast wave from the explosion. If the speed was toward the upper end of estimates, the astronomers determined that light from the explosion would have reached Earth about 670 years ago. However, further investigation revealed that it’s likely that debris impacted dense gas after the explosion—slowing down the shockwave and suggesting that the explosion happened more recently than 670 years ago. Astronomers may use additional observations with Hubble to determine more precisely when the time of the star’s demise should truly be set.
Image Description: A composite image from SNR 0519, the remnants of a distant supernova. The center of the image is dominated by the colorful remains of a destroyed star, along the exterior periphery of the debris a thin shell of blood-red wisps of gas as pictured from Hubble optical data. Within the red shell are X-rays with low, medium, and high energies displayed as mixed shades of green, blue, and purple, with some of these colors overlapping to appear creamy white. The whole of the debris resembles a colorful bubble. The background of the image is speckled with hundreds of stars, between them the deep blackness of space.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/GSFC/B. J. Williams et al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI
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