ESO captures the ghost of a giant star

A spooky spider internet, magical dragons or wispy trails of ghosts? What do you see on this picture of the Vela supernova remnant? This stunning tapestry of colours exhibits the ghostly stays of a big star, and was captured right here in unimaginable element with the VLT Survey Telescope, hosted on the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO’s) Paranal website in Chile.

The wispy construction of pink and orange clouds is all that continues to be of a large star that ended its life in a strong explosion round 11,000 years in the past. When probably the most huge stars attain the tip of their life, they typically exit with a bang, in an outburst referred to as a supernova. These explosions trigger shock waves that transfer by way of the encircling gasoline, compressing it and creating intricate thread-like constructions. The vitality launched heats the gaseous tendrils, making them shine brightly, as seen on this picture.

On this 554-million-pixel picture, we get an especially detailed view of the Vela supernova remnant, named after the southern constellation Vela (The Sails). You possibly can match 9 full Moons on this complete picture, and the entire cloud is even bigger. At solely 800 light-years away from Earth, this dramatic supernova remnant is among the closest recognized to us.

Because it exploded, the outermost layers of the progenitor star had been ejected into the encircling gasoline, producing the spectacular filaments that we observe right here. What stays of the star is an ultra-dense ball by which the protons and electrons are compelled collectively into neutrons—a neutron star. The neutron star within the Vela remnant, positioned barely outdoors of this picture to the higher left, occurs to be a pulsar that spins by itself axis at an unimaginable pace of greater than 10 instances per second.

This picture is a mosaic of observations taken with the wide-field digicam OmegaCAM on the VLT Survey Telescope (VST), hosted at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile. The 268-million-pixel digicam can take photos by way of a number of filters that permit by way of gentle of various colours. On this specific picture of the Vela remnant, 4 completely different filters had been used, represented right here by a mix of magenta, blue, inexperienced and purple.

The VST is owned by The Nationwide Institute for Astrophysics in Italy, INAF, and with its 2.6-meter mirror it is among the largest telescopes devoted to surveying the evening sky in seen gentle. This picture is an instance from such a survey: the VST Photometric Hα Survey of the Southern Galactic Airplane and Bulge (VPHAS+). For greater than seven years, this survey has mapped a substantial portion of our dwelling galaxy, permitting astronomers to raised perceive how stars type, evolve and ultimately die.