Puppis A, swirl and clicker

 

 

 

 

This image is another fragment of the medium-aged (about 10,000 years old) Supernova Remnant (SNR) Puppis A. You can also explore the first one we took. It is located 7,000 light years away in the constellation Puppis, very close to the northern border of a famous SNR, the Vela SNR. The strange and attractive shapes that this SNR has taken are due to the fact that the expelled gases have expanded in a previously non-homogeneous interstellar medium. True as this is, there are also “deformations” upon “deformations”. Pretty recently, in 2023, P. Ghavamian et al., proposed that a special shape they call the “swirl”, formed by circles and spirals, that can be found at the top left of this image, may be explained if the original star that exploded as supernova was not a single star but a massive binary. Apparently, the gases are distributed in a way that -in 3D- they seem to form a “funnel”. Divertimento: Another unusual shape of a fragment is the red emission nebula at the center of the image. We use to call it the “Clicker” nebula, due to its resemblance to some of the “bad guys” in the show “The Last of Us”… See this fragment below.

 

As is usual with SNRs, there is a neutron star as the remnant of the central star that exploded about 5,000 years ago. This remnant, the neutron star RX J0822-4300, is known as the Cosmic Cannonball with a real speed was 672 ± 115 km/s. This image was taken with narrowband filters (3 nm Halpha, SII and OIII) and color mapped to natural colors.