Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Cosmic Ornament of Gas and Dust

This beautiful bulb might look like a Christmas ornament but it is the blown-out remains of a stellar explosion, or supernova. The remains, called Cassiopeia A, are shown here in an infrared composite from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Silicon gas is blue and argon gas is green, while red represents about 10,000 Earth masses worth of dust. Yellow shows areas where red and green overlap.

The fact that the red and green do overlap indicates that this supernova is synthesizing dust and gas together. This is the smoking gun indicating that supernovae were significant suppliers of fresh dust in the very early universe -- something that was hard to demonstrate prior to the Spitzer observations.

The data for these images were taken by Spitzer's infrared spectrograph, which splits light apart to reveal the fingerprints of molecules and elements. In total, Spitzer collected separate "spectra" at more than 1,700 positions across Cassiopeia A. Astronomers then created maps from this massive grid of data, showing the remnant in a multitude of infrared colors.

About the Object	Object Name: Cassiopeia A Object Type: Supernova Remnant Position (J2000): RA: 23h23m24.00s Dec: 58d48m0.00s Distance: 11,000 light-years or 3.4 kpc Constellation: Cassiopeia
About the Data	Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/J. Rho (Spitzer Science Center) Instrument: IRS Wavelength: 5- 40 micron Exposure Date: January 13 2005 Exposure Time: a total of 11.3 hr with a total of 1756 IRS spectra Image Scale: 5.5 x 5.5 arcminutes Orientation: world coordinate system (north is up and west is right) Release Date: December 20, 2007
Observers	Jeonghee Rho (Spitzer Science Center, California Institute of Technology) Takashi Kozasa (Hokkaido University in Japan) William T. Reach (Spitzer Science Center, California Institute of Technology) J. D. Smith (Steward Observatory, University of Arizona) Lawrence Rudnick (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) Tracey Delaney (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge) Jessica A. Ennis (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities) Haley Gomez (University of Wales, Cardiff., UK) Achim Tappe (Spitzer Science Center/Caltech and the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge)

The Spitzer Space Telescope is a NASA mission managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This website is maintained by the Spitzer Science Center, located on the campus of the California Institute of Technology and part of NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center. Privacy Policy