Finally! Webb Finds a Neutron Star from Supernova 1987A universetoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from universetoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Take a good look at the latest image provided by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows a huge elliptical galaxy called NGC 474 that lies about 100 million light-years away from us.
In a planet-forming disk of gas and dust around a young, nearby star, two huge objects recently collided at high speed. The colossal impact was positively apocalyptic in size, vaporizing enough material to make a small planet at least. Even better, the huge dust cloud created in the event passed between us and the star, eclipsing it twice, allowing astronomers to learn more about this catastrophe.
Behold the brilliance of this cosmic snapshot obtained via the 520-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument engineered by the US Department of Energy and installed on the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile.
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA. Acknowledgment: M. Soraisam (University of Illinois). Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin
A program run by the NSF’s NOIRLab, DECam’s primary objective had been to map the structures of hundreds of millions of galaxies between 2013-2019 to hopefully glean new data on the mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy. This invisible force remains an enigma to astrophycists who believe it to be a guiding hand in accelerating the rate of expansion in the universe.
That changes everything. It means the 1670 event was far more energetic than previously thought, the gas is moving far faster, and that the ideas of what caused the actual event can be tossed out a window.
Zoom In
The new observations were made using the monster Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. They took spectra in the infrared, dissecting the light into vary narrow color bins, which allows the gas velocity to be accurately measured. Earlier observations had done this as well, but looked more toward the
inner part of the nebula, near the star where the gas isn t moving very rapidly; this time they looked at the very tips of the lobes (the short red arcs in the image), under the assumption that gas that got that far out is moving the fastest.