Debris from stellar explosion not slowed after 400 years

Astronomers have used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to record material blasting away from the site of an exploded star at speeds faster than 20 million miles per hour. This is about 25,000 times faster than the speed of sound on Earth.

Kepler's supernova remnant is the debris from a detonated star that is located about 20,000 light years away from Earth in our Milky Way galaxy. In 1604 early astronomers, including Johannes Kepler who became the object's namesake, saw the supernova explosion that destroyed the star.

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Credit: NASA/CXC/Univ of Texas at Arlington/M. Millard et al.

The latest study tracked the speed of 15 small "knots" of debris in Kepler's supernova remnant, all glowing in X-rays. The fastest knot was measured to have a speed of 23 million miles per hour, the highest speed ever detected of supernova remnant debris in X-rays.

The average speed of the knots is about 10 million miles per hour, and the blast wave is expanding at about 15 million miles per hour.

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In this new sequence of the four Chandra images of Kepler's supernova remnant, red, green, and blue reveal the low, medium, and high-energy X-rays respectively.

The movie zooms in to show several of the fastest moving knots.

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