A new image of the ghostly Vela supernova remnant shows off the fascinating and elaborate structure of this striking cosmic object. Taken using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), this enormous image is 1.3 gigapixels, making it DECam’s largest image to date.
A supernova remnant like this is formed when a massive star runs out of fuel and comes to the end of its life. With its hydrogen depleted, the star burns through some its other elements, but the end is now in sight: soon, the heat generated from the fusion won’t be enough to balance out the force of gravity pushing in on the star, and it will collapse in on itself. The energy of this collapse is so great that matter bounces outward in a tremendous explosion, throwing off layers of gas.
The supernova that created the Vela remnant, which is located 800 light-years away, happened around 11,000 years ago. Over the thousands of years since then, the shockwave caused by the supernova explosion has traveled out and away from the dead star to create a huge remnant almost 100 light-years across, It has sculpted the dust and gas of the interstellar medium into the delicate structures illuminated in this image, which you can compare to a previous image of the same structure taken by the VLT Survey Telescope.
The core of the dead star that created this epic structure wasn’t completely destroyed in the explosion, however. It lives on as the Vela pulsar, a type of ultra-dense core called a neutron star that has a powerful magnetic field that causes it to pulse with radio, optical, X-ray, and gamma wavelengths like a lighthouse. It is located in the bottom left of the image.
The DECam data was taken using three filters on the instrument, each of which is sensitive to a different wavelength of light. The reds, yellows, and blues each represent a different filter, and were layered together to create this extremely detailed image that has a total of 35,786 x 35,881 pixels.
