APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

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APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

Post by APOD Robot » Thu Jan 01, 2015 5:11 am

Image Vela Supernova Remnant

Explanation: The plane of our Milky Way Galaxy runs through this complex and beautiful skyscape. At the northwestern edge of the constellation Vela (the Sails) the telescopic frame is over 10 degrees wide, centered on the brightest glowing filaments of the Vela Supernova Remnant, an expanding debris cloud from the death explosion of a massive star. Light from the supernova explosion that created the Vela remnant reached Earth about 11,000 years ago. In addition to the shocked filaments of glowing gas, the cosmic catastrophe also left behind an incredibly dense, rotating stellar core, the Vela Pulsar. Some 800 light-years distant, the Vela remnant is likely embedded in a larger and older supernova remnant, the Gum Nebula.

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Re: APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

Post by ta152h0 » Thu Jan 01, 2015 6:05 am

excellent choice to start 2015 with. Have an ice cold one and just look at the image
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Re: APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

Post by Boomer12k » Thu Jan 01, 2015 7:18 am

Fascinating place...so many things going on near by....

Happy New Year, one and all!!!!

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Re: APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

Post by hoohaw » Thu Jan 01, 2015 9:59 am

Boomer12k wrote:Fascinating place...so many things going on near by....
Happy New Year, one and all!!!!
Yes! And imagine 11,000 years ago this bright star appearing in the sky! Around for weeks or months! I wonder who saw it, and what they thought. Is there any historical record of it being seen (I think not)?
Last edited by geckzilla on Thu Jan 01, 2015 10:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

Post by Ann » Thu Jan 01, 2015 12:07 pm

This is a very interesting part of the sky, full of bright stars of spectral classes O, B, A and F. At six o'clock in today's APOD is HD 72127, a multiple star dominated by a B-type component. The combined optical light of the components of HD 72127 is probably about 5,000 times the luminosity of the Sun, and the bolometric (total) luminosity of this multiple star may well be about 50,000 solar luminosities or more. Other luminaries around the Vela supernova remnant, but outside the field of today's APOD, are for example the brilliant O-type and Wolf-Rayet binary Gamma Velorum, O-type supergiant Zeta Puppis, the bright red giant Gamma Velorum, B-type supergiant LN Velorum, A-type bright giants HD 75063 and HD 73634 and F-type supergiant HD 74180. All these stars are likely at least 2,000 times brighter than the Sun in optical light and brighter still bolometrically.

The wealth of brilliant young stars near the Vela supernova remnant is in stark contrast to the modest stars near the Veil Nebula in Cygnus.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I can't help guessing that the supernova that left the Vela supernova remnant behind was a massive star undergoing core collapse, while the Veil Nebula supernova was more likely type Ia, a white dwarf acquiring mass from a companion until it blew.

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Re: APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

Post by starsurfer » Fri Jan 02, 2015 12:53 pm

Stardeath is beautiful, especially planetary nebulae! Besides the well known Vela supernova remnant and Veil Nebula, there are many other optically visible supernova remnants that could be imaged by amateur astrophotographers such as Puppis A or MSH 10-53 to name a few.
Ann wrote:The wealth of brilliant young stars near the Vela supernova remnant is in stark contrast to the modest stars near the Veil Nebula in Cygnus.
Ann
I think the amount of stars visible in an image depends on how dark the sky is from the location the image is taken. For example, this image of the Veil Nebula taken from near the Mauna Kea Observatory by Hisayoshi Kato shows a fairly dense Milky Way starfield.

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Re: APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

Post by Ann » Fri Jan 02, 2015 5:46 pm

starsurfer wrote:Stardeath is beautiful, especially planetary nebulae! Besides the well known Vela supernova remnant and Veil Nebula, there are many other optically visible supernova remnants that could be imaged by amateur astrophotographers such as Puppis A or MSH 10-53 to name a few.
Ann wrote:The wealth of brilliant young stars near the Vela supernova remnant is in stark contrast to the modest stars near the Veil Nebula in Cygnus.
Ann
I think the amount of stars visible in an image depends on how dark the sky is from the location the image is taken. For example, this image of the Veil Nebula taken from near the Mauna Kea Observatory by Hisayoshi Kato shows a fairly dense Milky Way starfield.
Good point, starsurfer, but I was trying to say that the Vela supernova remnant is located in a part of the sky where there are many massive and brilliant young stars. There really is a considerable number of massive stars located at, I would think, more or less the same distance from us as the Vela supernova remnant. This widefield image by Robert Gendler gives you an idea how the entire region is sparkling with massive stars and star formation.

The Veil Nebula, by contrast, seems surrounded by modest, low- and medium-mass stars. There are, for example, no emission nebulas here that are not part of the supernova remnant itself. The fact that lots and lots of run-of-the-mill Milky Way stars can be seen in the background of the Veil Nebula, given its proximity to the disk of the Milky Way, makes no difference here - the Veil Nebula neighborhood, unlike the Vela supernova remnant region, is still dominated by rather light-weight and dim stars. So because of that, I'm speculating that the Vela supernova progenitor was a massive star, while the Veil supernova progenitor was not.

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Re: APOD: Vela Supernova Remnant (2015 Jan 01)

Post by Ann » Fri Jan 02, 2015 6:06 pm

Okay - admittedly, and thanks to your image, starsurfer, I have been able to identify a few interesting blue stars located close to the Veil Nebula in the sky. There is for example HD 198820, which looks very strikingly blue in your image. This is apparently a star of spectral class B3III. Is it massive enough to go supernova itself? My guess - and it's just a guess - is that it is not. But there is another, more distant star located near the Veil Nebula, and that is HD 197702. Its spectral class may be B1III, and if so, then it is almost certainly massive enough to go supernova in the future. So maybe, just maybe, there might be a region of star formation here that produced both the Veil Nebula progenitor and HD 197702.

So maybe the star that exploded and produced the Veil Nebula was a massive star undergoing core collapse after all.

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