The Hubble Space Telescope of the NASA captured an image of a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1000 years agosomething the US space agency has described as celestial fireworks.
That supernova explosion, dating back to 1006 AD, is known as SN 1006caused by the last rattles of a white dwarf star nearly 7,000 light-years away.
According to a report from the NASA, the supernova was probably the brightest star ever seen by humans and surpassed Venus as the brightest object in the night skyonly to be overtaken by the Moon.
It was even visible during the day for weeks and remained visible to the naked eye for at least two and a half years before disappearing.
An unprecedented diameter
After several investigations and antecedents, the experts determined that SN 1006 is almost 60 light-years across and is still expanding at almost 10 million kilometers per hour..
However, even at this tremendous speed, observations typically separated by years are needed to see significant outward motion of the shock wave against the grid of background stars.
In the Hubble image shown, the supernova would have occurred far from the lower right corner of the image and the movement would be towards the upper left corner.
SN 1006 resides within our Milky Way Galaxy, located more than 14 degrees from the plane of the galaxy’s disk. In the photograph, you can see many background galaxies, which are the orange-colored outstretched objects far away in the distant universe that the image describes.
This image is a combination of hydrogen light observations taken with Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys in February 2006 and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 observations in blue, yellow-green, and near-infrared light, taken in April 2008. .
The supernova remnant, only visible in the hydrogen light filter, was given a red hue in the image. Also, most of the white dots are either foreground or background stars in our galaxy.