NASA. LARGE FORMAT. HUBBLE TELESCOPE. The... - Lot 228 - Vermot et Associés

Lot 228
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NASA. LARGE FORMAT. HUBBLE TELESCOPE. The... - Lot 228 - Vermot et Associés
NASA. LARGE FORMAT. HUBBLE TELESCOPE. The blurry, bright magenta structures in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image are the remnants of a star 10 to 15 times the mass of the Sun, which we would have seen explode into a supernova 3,000 years ago. The fast-moving gas from this remnant penetrates the surrounding gas of the galaxy, creating a supersonic shock wave in the surrounding medium and making the material glow. The Hubble visible light image reveals, deep within the remnant, a crescent-shaped cloud of pink emission from hydrogen and soft purple filaments that correspond to regions of glowing oxygen. A dense background of colored stars is also visible. Probing this tattered gaseous relic, the recently installed Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope detected pristine gas ejected from the doomed star that has not yet mixed with the gas in the interstellar medium. The supernova remnant, called N132D, is located in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small companion galaxy to the Milky Way located 170,000 light-years away. The resulting spectrum, taken in ultraviolet light, shows glowing oxygen and carbon in the remnant. These results allow astronomers to better understand why some stars form an abundance of certain elements, like oxygen, but not others. Because ultraviolet light is blocked by the Earth's atmosphere, observing N132D in the ultraviolet requires the use of the Hubble satellite. The widest range of spectral signatures of the glowing gas appears in the ultraviolet, allowing astronomers to determine the quantities, or abundances, of key elements such as oxygen, as well as elements whose abundances cannot be determined from visible light images, including carbon, magnesium, and silicon. Hubble's previous ultraviolet instruments were not sensitive enough to distinguish between unmixed ejecta from the supernova and "shocked" gas from the surrounding interstellar medium. Supernova remnants offer a rare opportunity to search for material hidden in the depths of a star. This provides information about the evolution of stars and the manufacture of chemicals within them. Supernova explosions also enrich the interstellar medium with new chemical elements, which are incorporated into future generations of stars. The visible light image was taken on August 2, 2009 with Hubble's new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).Vintage chromogenic print. Numbering in the margin on the front. Legend on label on the back. 40,6 X 40,6CM with margins.
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