Supernova-powered bow shock creates cosmic spectacle cool pics

hi all

some cool pics I thought you all might like
www.newscientist.com...

NOW that's one groovy star. Seen speeding like a bullet through a cloud of dust and gas, the massive star Zeta Ophiuchi is creating a colourful wave known as a bow shock. This happens because the star's motion is compressing dust grains like water at the bow of a ship.

To the naked eye Zeta Ophiuchi is a placid dot parked in the constellation Ophiuchus. But the infrared vision of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows how the shooting star is electrifying its surroundings. It creates a scene akin to a UV-triggered fluorescent blacklight poster, says Spitzer image specialist Robert Hurt of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Looking at the pictures reminds me of the nexus in Star Trek Generations. Pretty cool.

Stunning. s&f

I thought about posting this when I saw pictures of it on Hubble a few days ago (I think it was hubble) but didn't have time to throw a thread together. I'm glad someone posted it.

Very cool!

S&F

Thanks for sharing!

What makes this star move so fast?
Does anyone know?

Oh, it's ok I found it

Given its speed and direction, astronomers think the star once orbited an even heftier companion. But the biggest stars live fast and die young, and its partner exploded in a violent supernova blast that sent Zeta Ophiuchi careening away at a whopping 87,000 kilometres per hour.

wow

Originally posted by LeLeu
What makes this star move so fast?
Does anyone know?

Oh, it's ok I found it

Given its speed and direction, astronomers think the star once orbited an even heftier companion. But the biggest stars live fast and die young, and its partner exploded in a violent supernova blast that sent Zeta Ophiuchi careening away at a whopping 87,000 kilometres per hour.

wow

edit on 21-1-2013 by LeLeu because: (no reason given)

Good question..

...and answer

And yet its so damn hard to get a descent pictures of planets in our own galaxy

Originally posted by Senduko
And yet its so damn hard to get a descent pictures of planets in our own galaxy

It's all about angular resolution. Those two images span approximately 1 degree. For comparison, the full moon is 0.5 degrees across. So what you see in those images is huge. If you had infrared vision you would see this thing in the sky with your own eyes.

Here's a few images I created using WISE telescope data at skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov...
The images span 1 degree across.

22 / 12 / 4.6 microns


12 / 4.6 / 3.4 microns


Same as above but different brightness scaling


22 / 4.6 / 3.4 microns - similar to the published WISE image

This beautiful star is in today's Astronomy Picture Of the Day (APOD): apod.nasa.gov...

Like a ship plowing through cosmic seas, runaway star Zeta Ophiuchi produces the arcing interstellar bow wave or bow shock seen in this stunning infrared portrait. In the false-color view, bluish Zeta Oph, a star about 20 times more massive than the Sun, lies near the center of the frame, moving toward the left at 24 kilometers per second. Its strong stellar wind precedes it, compressing and heating the dusty interstellar material and shaping the curved shock front. Around it are clouds of relatively undisturbed material. What set this star in motion? Zeta Oph was likely once a member of a binary star system, its companion star was more massive and hence shorter lived. When the companion exploded as a supernova catastrophically losing mass, Zeta Oph was flung out of the system. About 460 light-years away, Zeta Oph is 65,000 times more luminous than the Sun and would be one of the brighter stars in the sky if it weren't surrounded by obscuring dust. The image spans about 1.5 degrees or 12 light-years at the estimated distance of Zeta Ophiuchi.

I want to repeat my earlier comment here that the full moon is approximately 0.5 degrees across, so this image is quite large in comparison. If we had infrared vision (and strong sensitivity to it) like the Spitzer telescope, we would see this scene clearly with the naked eye.

What would be really cool is to take images 10 years apart and compare them, to catch any movement of the star or the bow-shock across that time frame.