A huge 1.3-gigapixel image shows the remains of a giant star’s explosive death
VICTOR M BLANCO 4-METER TELESCOPE, 12 MARCH 2024
This stunning shot of the Vela supernova remnant, which is 11,000 years old and lies 900 lightyears from Earth, was captured by the US National Science Foundation’s Victor M Blanco 4-Meter Telescope using its Dark Energy Camera. It’s all that remains of an exploded star, and even though this supernova happened thousands of years ago, we can still see its shockwave colliding with the interstellar medium, producing the blue and yellow filaments shown here.
What’s more, the star itself is still out there. Known as the Vela Pulsar, it’s a dense stellar core known as a neutron star, with the mass of a Sun-like star condensed into an object just a few kilometres across.
Tower of darkness
VLT SURVEY TELESCOPE (VST), 11 MARCH 2024
Seen here is cometary globule GN 16.43.7.0.1, somewhat more catchily nicknamed ‘The Dark Tower’ by astronomers. Despite the name, cometary globules have nothing to do with comets. They’re actually a subset of Bok globules (small dark nebulae) that simply have a comet-like shape.
Disc world
VERY LARGE TELESCOPE/ALMA, 5 MARCH 2024
Created by combining data from ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) and the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), this image shows MWC
