2026-09-24
The Ghosts of Five Supernovas
Today's window into deep space: The Ghosts of Five Supernovas. The story behind the image:
Why this matters
Behind the picture is deep-space objects, the Moon. Light that left these objects long ago is only reaching us now, which is why a single image can double as a snapshot of the distant past.
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The science, from NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day
The ghosts of five supernovas haunt this extraordinary image. It was acquired at Oukaïmeden Observatory in Morocco with approximately 200 hours of observations and shows a large patch of the sky, equivalent to the area of one thousand full moons tiled together, in the constellation of Auriga (the charioteer). From left to right, the five supernova remnants visible across the field are G181.1+9.5, G182.4+4.3, G179.0+2.6, G180.0−1.7 (Sh2-240, the Spaghetti Nebula), and G178.2−4.2. They are highlighted in the annotated image, together with open cluster M37 and the Tadpole Nebula. As each explosion expanded into space, it created a growing shell of shocked gas and delicate filamentary structures shown in red (hydrogen) and blue (oxygen), respectively. These ancient stellar explosions happened independently; they are at various distances up to about several thousands of light-years away from Earth and have estimated ages up to tens of thousands of years old. Early humans may have witnessed them as bright new stars, fading over weeks or months. APOD's email for image submissions has changed. Please see: APOD Submissions. APOD's main NASA site is moving : From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod
Image credit: Stephane Vetter, Yann Sainty Text: Cecilia Chirenti (NASA GSFC, UMCP, CRESST II) · Source: NASA APOD
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