#JWST is often cited for its amazing work with galaxies, BUT LOOK AT IT DISSECTING UP THE CRAB NEBULA AND SHOWING US STAR GUTS FROM A 1000-YEAR OLD STELLAR DETONATION.
Wow! Look at the pulsar!
So epic that we can see this detail, the different structures, elements, velocities, energies, etc. from an event that Chinese and Japanese astronomers witnessed and documented 1000 years back.
We're connected through time with this event to them!
Got another 1.5 hours of light last night from nearby(ish) galaxy NGC 3621 which features the recent supernova #SN2024ggi
Have now been grabbing light from this event over a few months and can see its colour/flux temporal evolution.
Caught it with VIVID’s extreme light pollution too! (VIVID is a very popular festival of light here in Sydney in which light pollution increases by several orders of magnitude!)
Picture of the day: This wild-looking supernova remnant is nicknamed the Jellyfish Nebula. Supernovas produce some of the strangest objects in the night sky.
And I just happened to catch it from my city light-polluted backyard, using a 5cm aperture SeestarS50!
Check it out ... on the left is my image (only 25 mins of data). The cross hairs indicate a 'new star' appearing in galaxy NGC 3621. The right image is from Stellarium and I have annotated where the new star appears, and how it was not there before.
This is a type II supernova, so a massive star's core collapsed and triggered off an extremely violent explosion that we are seeing 22 million years later.
It likely formed a neutron star or pulsar!
It is incredibly bright and I encourage everyone to turn their telescopes towards it and get data / light curves!
Astrophotographers/astronomers with 'scopes capable of low-res spectrography:
Turn your telescopes to NGC 3621, a field galaxy only 7 MPC away! Supernova alert issued with progenitor data available. ⭐💥
NGC 3621 (aka the Frame Galaxy or Southern Cross Galaxy) is fairly bright and if you are around the same latitude as Sydney (many southern cities) it gets very near zenith around 9 - 10pm local time, so an easy and bright target.
The supernova, known as SN 1987A, occurred 160 000 light-years from Earth in the Large Magellanic Cloud. #SN1987A was a type II supernova that was observed on Earth in 1987, the first supernova that was visible to the naked eye since 1604 — before the advent of telescopes.
"Tikva Forum says family informed by IDF of fate of 35-year-old father of two, who was abducted from Supernova festival on October 7; relatives remember 'happy and loved man'"
However, a secondary paper from a few days back, which also used JWST MIRI, found no evidence of the compact remnant in their data: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.14014v1
Almost 2 years ago I wrote a feature article looking at the evidence for this, so these new papers and findings are exciting!
There are better pictures of NGC4216, a Galaxy you can find in Virgo’s Constellation. My idea, however, to capture it was two-folded: to capture it “as it appears to be” from my rooftop in Mexico City, but mostly to capture and understand the supernova explosion that happened there a few weeks ago and that you can find (WOW!) in my photograph.
I was able to capture the #supernova SN 2024gy in the #galaxy NGC 4216 last night. I did not highlight it but it is the "star" in the upper right edge of the center galaxy in this photo.
This was taken with the Celestron C11 and the Nikon D750 at ISO 800, 46x120s exposures. #astrophotography#Astrodon
Watching 🇮🇹 Sanremo, saw the start of 🇫🇮 UMK, 🇱🇻 Supernova is going on right now…and 🇸🇪 Melodifestivalen has another semi-final, 🇱🇹 Eurovizija_LT has their final semi-final, and 🇩🇰 Dansk Melodi Grand Prix did their official artist introductions and BTS stuff.