This week, I chose the picture called Vela Supernova Remnant. It was posted on September 10, 2010. This picture was photo shopped, so one would not be able to see something like this in space with a telescope. This photo captures what happens after a massive star explodes. When a star explodes, a huge fireball of hot gas shoots out in all directions.
This star exploded about 11,000 years ago. When the star first exploded, a burst of light could be seen by the people on Earth. It generated a shock wave, which is still visible today. The outer layers of this star crashed into the interstellar medium, making this shock occur. The shock wave is what is being seen in this picture.Almost spherical, it has become as big as twenty times the diameter of a full moon. Gas flies away from the exploded star, and produces all of the light seen in the photograph. Overall, the colorful substance being seen in the photo shocked parts of glowing gas.
In addition to leaving all of this gas behind, the explosions also created a dense, spinning, stellar core called the Vela Pulsar. The Vela Pulsar is a neutron star, meaning it is about twenty kilometers in diameter, and is bigger than the sun. It even has the density of an atomic nucleus. And, it has amazing x-ray like rings and jets that were left over from the Crab Nebula, which was a remnant of a supernova left over from the year 1054 A.D.
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