Detailed radio observations turn up previously unseen remnants of dying stars in our galaxy.
The image shows five previously hidden supernova remnants. The colours represent heat, with purple denoting the coolest regions, followed by blue, green and red, with white highlighting the hottest parts. Credit: R. Kothes and the PEGASUS team
A star in the Milky Way is expected to explode as a supernova roughly at least once every 100 years. These violent explosions — the dramatic final throes of massive stars as they exhaust their fuel — can eject vast clouds of dust and gas to locations many light years from the star. Such ‘supernova remnants’ can persist for thousands of years before dissipating.
On 16 January, however, a project led by Ball revealed a new way to track supernova remnants down. It combined the observing power of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder , a radio telescope comprising 36 antennas in Western Australia, with that of the Parkes Observatory, a single dish in New South Wales, Australia, to detect previously unseen supernova remnants in a patch of night sky.
The image the team released contains about five of the 21 newly discovered supernova remnants, including one shaped like a figure of eight, seen faintly in the top left. The picture was taken along one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, the Norma Arm, near the dense Galactic Centre, where dust and gas heavily obscure visible light.
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