There is not any higher technique to understand the life cycle of stars than watching it unfold.
This weekend, a NASA rocket will study a dramatic stellar event about 2,600 light-years from Earth within the constellation Cygnus. In that pocket of the universe, a once massive star, perhaps 20 times the scale of our sun, exploded in a superb supernova that will have been vibrant enough for those on Earth to see with an unaided eye, even through the day.
Although the blast occurred some 20,000 years ago, star matter ejected through the explosion continues to be fanning out at 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) every hour — it spanned 3 times the scale of a full moon back in 2012 and is now considered 120 light-years across.
The remnant, known to astronomers because the Cygnus Loop, is kind of a rare find, because it reflects an ongoing supernova blast. It’s showing us in real time how heavy elements that formed within the late star’s heart are returned back into the universe, where the following generation of stars and galaxies will inherit them and manifest across eons.
“Supernovae just like the one which created the Cygnus Loop have a huge effect on how galaxies form,” Brian Fleming of the University of Colorado Boulder, who’s the principal investigator for the upcoming mission, said in a statement.
Fleming and his team will observe the Cygnus Loop on Sunday by launching an instrument atop a small sounding rocket into suborbital space.
Lifting off from Latest Mexico Sunday at 11:35 p.m. ET (0335 GMT on Oct. 30), the INFUSE mission (short for “Integral Field Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Experiment”) is anticipated to gather information in regards to the remnant for a couple of minutes from a height of 150 miles (240 km).
Specifically, the instrument will gather light streaming from the Cygnus Loop in far-ultraviolet wavelengths. This glow shows that the remnant’s sizzling dust and gas, considered between 90,000 and 540,000 degrees Fahrenheit (about 50,000 to 300,000 degrees Celsius), is crashing into frigid cold gas in space because it expands.
“INFUSE will observe how the supernova dumps energy into the Milky Way by catching light given off just because the blast wave crashes into pockets of cold gas floating across the galaxy,” Fleming said in the identical statement.
Astronomers say this data will tell them where specific elements lie along the remnant, and ultimately help them understand life cycles of stars and galaxies.