Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Z. Wang (MIT)

Circle of Ashes

This plot tells astronomers that a pulsar, the remnant of a stellar explosion, is surrounded by a disk of its own ashes. The disk, revealed by the two data points at the far right from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, is the first ever found around a pulsar. Astronomers believe planets might rise up out of these stellar ashes.

The data in this plot, or spectrum, were taken by ground-based telescopes and Spitzer. They show that light from around the pulsar can be divided into two categories: direct light from the pulsar, and light from the dusty disk swirling around the pulsar. This excess light was detected by Spitzer's infrared array camera. Dust gives off more infrared light than the pulsar because it's cooler.

The pulsar, called 4U 0142+61, was once a massive star, until about 100,000 years ago, when it blew up in a supernova explosion and scattered dusty debris into space. Some of that debris was captured into what astronomers refer to as a "fallback disk," now circling the leftover stellar core, or pulsar. The disk resembles protoplanetary disks around young stars, out of which planets are thought to be born.

The data have been corrected to remove the effects of light scattering from dust that lies between Earth and the pulsar.

The ground-based data is from the Keck I telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

About the Object	Object Name: 4U 0142+61 Object Type: Neutron star (AXP) Position (J2000): RA: 01 46 22.40 Dec: +61 45 02.9 Distance: 12,700 light-years (3.9 kpc) Magnitude: Ks = 20; 51.9 +/- 5.2 uJy at 8 microns; 36.3 +/- 3.6 uJy at 4.5 microns Constellation: Cassiopeia
About the Data	Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Z. Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Instrument: Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) Wavelength: 4.5 and 8.0 microns Exposure Date: 17 January 2005 Exposure Time: 75 minutes (8.0 microns); 77 minutes (4.5 microns) Release Date: 5 April 2006
Observers	Zhongxiang Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Deepto Chakrabarty (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) David Kaplan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

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