Credit: NASA/CXC/NCSU/K.J.Borkowski et al.

NASA recently published an exquisite image of the dazzling debris of an exploding star (supernova), located in a nearby galaxy, known as the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Actually, the supernova remnant, known as N132D, is the brightest stellar remains in the LMC, and is extraordinarily rich in oxygen. It is theorized that the oxygen we breathe originated in similar stellar explosions.

The LMC is a relatively small, irregular companion galaxy of our Milky Way Galaxy. It is one of our nearest cosmic neighbors, located nearly 160,000 light years away. It is named in honor of the 16th century maritime explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, who described the LMC, and its neighboring galaxy, the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). Both of the Magellanic Clouds are visible to the unaided eye from the Southern Hemisphere and the low northern latitudes. They glow as small nebulous patches near the Milky Way.

The image was taken in X-rays by one of NASA’s space observatories, the Chandra X-ray Observatory (CXO). X-rays are an invisible form of electromagnetic radiation; similar in nature to the visible light, but they have much higher frequencies. As our atmosphere absorbs most of the X-rays, the Universe can be studied in X-rays only by spacecraft, rockets or high-altitude balloons.

The colors in the image correspond to the energies (frequencies) of the detected X-ray emission. Red represents low energy X-rays; green represents intermediate energy X-rays; and blue represents high energy X-rays.

The object of these observations is to estimate the mass of the progenitor star and to learn more about how massive stars explode and seed the interstellar space with chemical elements like oxygen and carbon.

Illustration of CXO’s orbit and Earth’s radiation belts
Credit: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

Chandra was launched by the Space Shuttle Columbia into a low Earth orbit, on 23 July 1999. Then, the Inertial Upper Stage rocket boosted Chandra up to a higher altitude where a built-in propulsion system took Chandra to its final elliptical orbit. In this orbit, CXO’s altitude varies from 133,000 km (more than a third of the average distance to the Moon) to 16,000 km. A complete orbit lasts approximately 64 hours and 18 minutes. Chandra is named in honor of the Indian-American physicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Further Reading

CXO
http://chandra.harvard.edu/index.html

Aymen Mohamed Ibrahem
Senior Astronomy Specialist