Bright Jellyfish

Credit: X-ray (NASA/CXC/MIT/D.Dewey et al. & NASA/CXC/SAO/J.DePasquale); Opti­cal (NASA/STScI)

A bright jel­ly­fish floats free in a star­lit sea in this image from NASA’s Chan­dra X-ray Obser­va­tory.

Explore this image of super­nova rem­nant E0102. Tell us what you see or tell us a story in the com­ments below.

A mas­sive star exploded in the Small Mag­el­lanic Cloud to cre­ate this neb­ula. Called E0102, this blue-green neb­ula is all thats left of the star after it com­pletely destroyed itself. Mas­sive stars, twenty times the mass of our Sun, burn their hydro­gen fuel very quickly. They have short lives. They also burn hot­ter than nor­mal stars. Even­tu­ally they can­not keep up the pace. Pres­sure from the inside of the star pushes out the stars out­er­most lay­ers but at some point grav­ity quickly pulls all this mate­r­ial back onto the star. The star becomes super-hot, so hot that the star explodes. Super­novae are so bright they briefly out­shine an entire galaxy.

The Chan­dra image shows the hot blast wave pro­duced by the super­nova in blue, and an inner ring of cooler, red-orange, mate­r­ial. This inner ring prob­a­bly formed as some of the shock­wave bounced back into the expand­ing cloud of gas and dust and caused it to heat up. A mas­sive star, out of the image, is illu­mi­nat­ing the green cloud of gas and dust to the lower right of the image. This star may be sim­i­lar to the one that exploded to form E0102. Images from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope fills in the rest of the image show­ing stars in nor­mal light. Explore another Hub­ble view of E0102.

Have you ever won­dered where astronomers come up with names for the objects they see in the skies? E0102 is short for its place­ment in the celes­tial sphere. Imag­ine tak­ing the globe of the Earth and pro­ject­ing that on the heav­ens. Sci­en­tists mark off coor­di­nates in the sky sim­i­larly to how they mea­sure coor­di­nates on Earth. For­mally, the super­nova rem­nant is called 1E0102.2–7219.

This super­nova hap­pened more than 1,000 years ago and would have been vis­i­ble from Earth. E0102 and N76 are found about 190,000 light-years away from Earth in the Small Mag­el­lanic Cloud. The SMC is a nearby, dwarf galaxy to the Milky Way Galaxy and is vis­i­ble in the south­ern con­stel­la­tion of Tucana.