Supernova's purple haze illuminates stellar nursery

Flora Graham, deputy online editor

(Image: Herschel: Quang Nguyen Luong & F. Motte, HOBYS Key Program consortium, Herschel SPIRE/PACS/ESA)

In Purple Haze, Jimi Hendrix sang: "Excuse me while I kiss the sky." The swirling purple haze in this composite image from European Space Agency telescopes is so stunning, it may give you a similar urge.

The vast violet region in the image is W44, the remnant of a supernova. This gas and dust were once the outer layers of a massive star that reached the end of its life in a spectacular explosion about 20,000 years ago. The star's core survives as an ultra-dense, rotating neutron star - a pulsar - visible as bright blue point in the top left of the purple cloud.

This picture is a composite of infrared and X-ray light captured by the Herschel and XMM-Newton space observatories. The vivid blue and violet colours indicate the high-energy X-rays that shine from the pulsar and the hot gas that surrounds it. The warmer colours show gently heated gas and dust further from W44, where new stars are forming.

Source: http://feeds.newscientist.com/c/749/f/10897/s/25a767a7/l/0L0Snewscientist0N0Cblogs0Cshortsharpscience0C20A120C110Csupernova0Epurple0Ehaze0Bhtml0Dcmpid0FRSS0QNSNS0Q20A120EGLOBAL0Qonline0Enews/story01.htm

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