Still booming at over 20 million km / h [Video]

Astronomers have used NASA‘s Chandra X-ray Observatory to record blasted material away from the site of an exploded star at speeds in excess of 20 million miles per hour. This is about 25,000 times faster than the speed of sound on Earth. The rest of the Kepler supernova is debris from a star that exploded about 20,000 light-years from Earth in our Milky Way galaxy.

In 1604, the first astronomers, including Johannes Kepler, who became the namesake of the object, noted the supernova explosion that destroyed the star. What Johannes Kepler did not know at the time was that the new object he saw was caused by a small dense star that exceeded a mass limit after interacting with a companion star, triggering a thermonuclear explosion. Today, astronomers call it a Type Ia supernova, and they can study overheated debris that expands in space and glows in x-ray light.

The researchers estimated the speed of different clusters in Kepler by analyzing the Chandra x-ray spectra, the spread of light that gives the amount of x-rays at different wavelengths. This allowed astronomers to use the Doppler effect to convert the wavelength changes in characteristics of the x-ray spectrum into velocities along the line of sight from Chandra to the rest. They combined this information with measurements of the change in position of the clusters between the Chandra images obtained in 2000, 2004, 2006 and 2014. Thanks to this, astronomers were able to measure movements perpendicular to our line of sight and then estimate the speeds of each cluster.

Kepler’s high speeds are similar to those scientists have seen in supernova explosions in other galaxies just days or weeks after the explosion. This may mean that some Kepler clusters have barely been slowed down by collisions with material surrounding the rest in the roughly 400 years since the explosion.

Scientists are still trying to determine exactly why these Kepler clusters are moving so fast. It could be a particularly powerful supernova explosion, or maybe the environment in which the debris is moving is less dense in some places. Either way, this item will continue to be something to watch out for in the years to come.