August 29, 2006: Cassiopeia A supernova by Hubble

It's been a while since we had a space shot. I imagine this will be tomorrow's Astro Pic of the Day; today, WaPo highlighted it and so I went and found a big version at Hubble's website. The image is actually a stitch of 18 different images, and I cropped it for our purposes.

Cassiopeia-A is the "youngest known remnant from a supernova explosion in the Milky Way." It's in the Cassiopeia constellation.

300 years ago, it was a massive star, sitting around 10,000 light years from us; then, one day, it just exploded. Nobody knows why; supernovae are pretty mysterious. Perhaps it found an empty ice cube tray in the freezer.

Cassie A. would have been much larger and more dense than our own sun, and the resulting explosion would have been so unimaginably massive as to be beyond our comprehension. All we see now is the result: a huge, expanding cloud of interstellar dust. If you're interstellarly allergic, you might want to avoid that section of the galaxy.

They actually don't know why nobody noticed the explosion 300 years ago. People were looking, by then, and writing down what they saw.

And 25 years ago, telescopy was less advanced and someone theorized that the center might contain a black hole. Now they say it doesn't. I dunno what it would look like here... shrug, big black hole I guess.

Wikipedia entry

Well, that will be one hell of a screen background ...

Hang on, I'll build a few wallpapers in the right formats.

I can see the devil's face!!

*runs around in circles*

"empty ice cube tray" "interstellarly allergic"

You have fun writing these up, don't you?

Wallpapers, right-click and save in your desired format:

Cas A 1024x768 jpg

Cas A 1280x960 jpg

Cas A 1280x1024 jpg

Cas A 1600x1200 jpg

glatt, I do laugh at all my own jokes.

It's an evil space hedgehog!

Looks like rainbow coloured water splashed amongst the stars.

It looks like beautiful vomit.

No, seriously, it is awe-inspiring.

I'm sure other people noticed this but I'll point it out just to be on record. If it's ~10,000 lightyears from us then the supernova occured 10,300 years ago, we only got the update recently. Kinda ties back into the quantum mechanics stipulation that no information may be transmitted faster than the speed of light (including gravity waves, so even if we could have measured these more than 300 years ago they wouldn't change till the light reached us).

I'm typeless.

Thanks for the wallpaper undertoad! It is awesome!
It looks like the head and arms of a monster with huge teeth and claws!!

i think someone just sneezed on the lens

Maybe nobody noticed it 300 years ago because it was a very cloudy week.

Although, presumably a star that big and that close would have been in a constellation chart and someone must have noticed at some point that it was gone.

So when does the shock wave hit? I'm not letting go of this tree till then. Except to go to the bathroom.

9th is almost right.
we saw the light 300 years ago..... and it's 10,000 light years away...


so the biggish bang was 9,700 years ago.

You have that backwards, Jay. The picture above is how it looks now to us, i.e. the image is 10,000 years old. When the explosion itself was 10,000 years old, it was sometime in the 1700s for us. So the explosion (which we have no picture of, but if we did) happened roughly 10,300 years ago.

how soon is now?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Undertoad Wallpapers, right-click and save in your desired format: Cas A 1024x768 jpg Cas A 1280x960 jpg Cas A 1280x1024 jpg Cas A 1600x1200 jpg glatt, I do laugh at all my own jokes.

Did 'THEY' delete Pluto off this image as well? I don't see him anywhere. And I liked Pluto.
The wallpaper is super. Thanks, UT. I have Star Wars theme on my other computer. Goes well.