Filament structure of the supernova remnant Pa 30 (VIDEO)
Caption
In 1181, astronomers in China and Japan recorded a new star in the sky, a rare supernova explosion. The remains of that supernova, called SN 1181, are depicted here in this artist’s animation, which flies around the remnant as it appears today in one moment in time. The corpse of the star that detonated, a hot and inflated "zombie" star, is seen within a dusty shell of ejected material. Beyond the dusty shell, bright radial filaments of sulfur extend three light-years out from their point of origin. The Keck Cosmic Web Imager (KCWI) at the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawai‘i has mapped these filaments in 3-D and shown that they are flying outward at approximately 1,000 kilometers per second.
Credit
W.M. Keck Observatory/Adam Makarenko
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