Description: Chandra's three-color image (inset) of a region of Puppis A (blue ROSAT wide-angle image) reveals a cloud being torn apart by a shockwave produced by a supernova explosion. This is the first X-ray detection of such a process in an advanced phase. In the inset, the blue vertical bar and the blue fuzzy ball or cap to the right show how the cloud has been spread out into an oval-shaped structure that is almost empty in the center. Understanding how shock waves interact with clouds is important for answering key questions such as the role supernovas play in heating interstellar gas and triggering the collapse of large interstellar clouds to form new generations of stars.

Creator/Photographer: Chandra X-ray Observatory

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia on July 23, 1999, is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory built to date. The mirrors on Chandra are the largest, most precisely shaped and aligned, and smoothest mirrors ever constructed. Chandra is helping scientists better understand the hot, turbulent regions of space and answer fundamental questions about origin, evolution, and destiny of the Universe. The images Chandra makes are twenty-five times sharper than the best previous X-ray telescope. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra science and flight operations from the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Medium: Chandra telescope x-ray

Date: 2006

Persistent URL: chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2006/puppisa/

Repository: Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory

Gift line: Chandra: NASA/CXC/GSFC/U.Hwang et al.