(ORDO NEWS) — Astronomers have analyzed the remnants of supernova SNR 0519, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud 160,000 light-years from Earth. It was formed after the explosion of a white dwarf.
According to astronomers, the thermonuclear explosion occurred either as a result of material being pulled out of a companion star, or as a result of a merger with another white dwarf.
The analysis of such explosions allows us to better understand the processes of thermonuclear explosions and measure the distances to galaxies that are billions of light years away.
Many telescopes have been used to understand how long ago the star in SNR 0519 exploded and to learn about the environment in which the supernova formed.
The astronomers used data from NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
These data were combined with data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The combined image showed low, medium, and high energies seen in green, blue, and purple, respectively, with some of these colors overlapping and appearing white.
The team compared images taken by Hubble in 2010, 2011 and 2020 to measure the speed of matter inside the explosion, which reaches 9 million kilometers per hour.
“Had the speed been closer to the upper limit of the calculated speeds, the light from the explosion would have reached the Earth about 670 years ago, or during the Hundred Years War between England and France and at the height of the Ming Dynasty in China,” NASA said.
However, astronomers believe that the movement of material has since slowed down, and the explosion occurred much earlier than 670 years ago. Astronomers have found that the brightest regions are where the slowest moving material is found.
The results of the research were published in the Astrophysical Journal, which says that some of the blast waves crashed into the dense gas around the remnant of the star, causing it to slow down as it moves.
The team is currently working to determine exactly when the star’s death occurred.
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