Supernova 2004dj, Outskirts Of Ngc 2403
by Science Source
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Supernova 2004dj, Outskirts Of Ngc 2403
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Science Source
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Photograph - Photograph
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Supernova SN 2004dj resides in the outskirts of NGC 2403, a galaxy located 11 million light-years from Earth. The arrow at top right points to the stellar blast, called a supernova, which is so bright in this NASA Hubble Space Telescope image that it easily could be mistaken for a foreground star in our Milky Way Galaxy. It is the closest stellar explosion discovered in more than a decade. The star that became SN 2004dj may have been about 15 times as massive as the Sun, and only about 14 million years old. The supernova is part of a compact cluster of stars known as Sandage 96; many such clusters (blue regions) as well as looser associations of massive stars can be seen in this image. The heart of NGC 2403 is the glowing region at lower left. Sprinkled across the region are pink areas of star birth. The myriad of faint stars visible in the Hubble image belong to NGC 2403, but the handful of very bright stars in the image belong to our own Milky Way Galaxy and are only a few hundred to a few thousand light-years away. This image was taken on August 17, two weeks after Japanese amateur astronomer Koichi Itagaki discovered the supernova on July 31, 2004, with a small telescope. Additional observations soon showed that it is a "Type II" supernova. This color-composite photograph was obtained by combining images through several filters taken with the Wide Field Camera of the Advanced Camera for Surveys. Young stars appear blue; older stars and dense dust lanes near the galaxy's heart are red; star-forming regions rich in hydrogen are pink; and the dense concentration of older stars in the galaxy's central bulge is yellow.
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December 2nd, 2015
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