Kepler’s Supernova Remnant in X-Rays
Aikaterini Niovi Triantafillaki
Kepler’s Supernova Remnant: The Most Recent Explosion in Our Galaxy
What caused this chaos? Some kind of star exploded, creating the unusually shaped nebula we now know as Kepler’s Supernova Remnant. But what kind of star was it?
The light from this explosion reached Earth in October 1604, just four centuries ago. The supernova created a new, bright star in the sky of the 17th century, located in the constellation Ophiuchus. The astronomer Johannes Kepler, along with his contemporaries, studied it without the help of a telescope, seeking to explain the celestial phenomenon.
Today, equipped with modern knowledge of stellar evolution and the power of space telescopes, astronomers continue to study the expanding debris cloud. Thanks to the Chandra X-ray Observatory, we now have data that reveal elemental abundances typical of a Type Ia supernova. The study indicates that the exploding star was a white dwarf that had accumulated too much mass from a companion red giant, surpassing the Chandrasekhar limit.
Located about 13,000 light-years away, it is considered the most recent supernova ever observed in our own Milky Way galaxy.