NASA | MSFC | SAO | Chandra X-ray Observatory | 2019 Aug 26
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has captured many spectacular images of cosmic phenomena over its two decades of operations, but perhaps its most iconic is the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A. ...
X-ray Time-lapse of Cassiopeia A
(Credit: NASA/CXC/RIKEN/T. Sato et al.)
The video shows Chandra observations of Cas A from 2000 to 2013. In that time, a child could enter kindergarten and graduate from high school. While the transformation might not be as apparent as that of a student over the same period, it is remarkable to watch a cosmic object change on human time scales.
The blue, outer region of Cas A shows the expanding blast wave of the explosion. The blast wave is composed of shock waves, similar to the sonic booms generated by a supersonic aircraft. These expanding shock waves produce X-ray emission and are sites where particles are being accelerated to energies that reach about two times higher than the most powerful accelerator on Earth, the Large Hadron Collider. As the blast wave travels outwards at speeds of about 11 million miles per hour, it encounters surrounding material and slows down, generating a second shock wave - called a "reverse shock" - that travels backwards, similar to how a traffic jam travels backwards from the scene of an accident on a highway. ...
X-Ray Measurements of the Particle Acceleration Properties at Inward Shocks in Cassiopeia A ~ Toshiki Sato et al
- Astrophysical Journal 853(1):46 (2018 Jan 20) DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aaa021
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1710.06992 > 19 Oct 2017 (v1), 06 Dec 2017 (v2)