Flying Dust

NASA/CXC/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

Dust from the remains of a col­lapsed star flies past a nearby fam­ily of stars in this image from NASA’s Chan­dra and Spitzer space telescopes.

The star clus­ter may have been home to a super­nova explo­sion, sci­en­tists believe. The dust from G54.1+0.3 is just now engulf­ing the neigh­bor­ing stars. Super­novae occur when stars that are five to ten times more mas­sive than our Sun reach the end of their lives. These mas­sive stars burn through their hydro­gen and helium fuel so quickly that they live only a few mil­lion years. Once the fuel is used up, they col­lapse sud­denly and then blast their outer lay­ers into space. For a short time, super­nova can out­shine an entire galaxy.

The left­over remains of the star is seen in this image as the white spot near the cen­ter. This remain­ing core has become a pul­sar, a rapidly rotat­ing neu­tron star. This star is spew­ing a blis­ter­ing wind of high-energy par­ti­cles. The high-speed par­ti­cles light up the glow­ing blue cloud of mate­r­ial. The neb­ula spans more than 6 light-years. The pul­sar and sur­round­ing neb­ula are sim­i­lar to the Crab and Vela super­nova remnants.

Explore this com­pos­ite image. Sci­en­tists com­bined light from the obser­va­to­ries to get a clearer pic­ture of what is going on. Chan­dra observes the uni­verse in X-ray which is blue in the image. Spitzer, with its infrared tele­scopes, sees much longer wave­length light, seen as red and green in the image.

G54.1+03 offers sci­en­tists are rare view of a freshly formed super­nova. The stars sur­round­ing the super­nova actu­ally offer clues for sci­en­tists because with­out them, the dust would not glow. As gas and dust move away from the super­nova it cools rapidly mak­ing it too cold for Spitzer to observe. The red glow is that dust warmed by the suns of the clus­ter. Dust near the stars is hottest and glows yel­low in the image.

Sci­en­tists esti­mate G54.1+03 lies about 20,000 light-years from Earth toward the con­stel­la­tion Sagitta, the Arrow. In ancient Greek mythol­ogy, the con­stel­la­tion depicted the arrow Her­cules used to kill the eagle Aquila.