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TheMightyChickadee writes:

You Can Finally Watch The Blast of a Cosmic Supernova With Your Own Eyes:

A ghostly "hand" reaching through the cosmos has just given us new insight into the violent deaths of massive stars.

The spectacular structure is the ejecta from a core-collapse supernova, and, by taking images of it over a 14-year span, astronomers have been able to observe as it blasts into space at around 4,000 kilometers (2,485 miles) per second.

At the very tips of the "fingers", the supernova remnant and blast wave - named MSH 15-52 - is punching into a cloud of gas called RCW 89, generating shocks and knots in the material, and causing the expanding supernova to decelerate.

MSH 15-52 is located 17,000 light-years away from Earth, and it seems to be one of the youngest known supernova remnants in the Milky Way. Light from the stellar explosion reached Earth approximately 1,700 years ago, as the progenitor star ran out of fuel to support fusion, exploding its outer material into space, and collapsing its core.

Exactly how fast it is expanding has been detailed in a new study, which uses images from 2004, 2008, and 2017-2018 to observe changes in RCW 89 as the supernova remnant plunges into it.

By calculating the distance traveled by these features over time, we have a better understanding of the velocity of the shock wave, and knots of ejected stellar material in MSH 15-52. You can see this in the image below.

animated-supernova.gif (GIF image, 187 KiB)

Important to distinguish the velocity of the shockwave, and the velocity of the knots of stellar matter, which is not measured in knots.

Journal Reference:
Kazimierz J. Borkowski, Stephen P. Reynolds, and William Miltich. Fast Blast Wave and Ejecta in the Young Core-collapse Supernova Remnant MSH 15-52/RCW 89 - IOPscience, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ab91c0)

Original Submission