The Vela Remnant is one of the nearest supernova remnants to the Sun, a vast web of glowing filaments in the southern sky with a bright pulsar at its heart.
At a glance
| type | supernova remnant |
|---|---|
| distance from the Sun | 946 light-years (290 pc) |
| its light left it | 946 years ago |
| size in the piece | about 130 light-years acrossmodel |
Read off the piece’s own catalogue, the same values it draws with. Model marks a property of the piece’s galaxy model rather than a measurement.
About Vela Remnant
The Vela supernova exploded near enough that its remnant now spans a large area of sky in Vela and Puppis, a tangle of faint filaments where the expanding shock meets interstellar gas. The star’s collapsed core survives as the Vela Pulsar, a neutron star whose spin is slowing and which occasionally speeds up abruptly in events called glitches, a window onto the interior of neutron stars.
In gamma rays the Vela Pulsar is one of the brightest steady sources in the sky. It powers a small wind nebula of its own, seen in X-rays, inside the larger shell.
On the sky the remnant overlaps Puppis A, but the two are unrelated: Puppis A lies far behind it.
What you see in the piece
Close by, it is drawn as a huge, hollow shell of shocked gas wrapped around the pulsar; fly to it and the shell surrounds you.
Measured or modelled
Its age is inferred from the pulsar’s spin-down and the shell’s expansion. The drawn extent is modelled from its size on the sky and distance.
Questions
How far away is the Vela supernova remnant?
The Vela Remnant is about 946 light-years (290 pc) from the Sun, one of the nearest known.
What is inside the Vela supernova remnant?
The Vela Pulsar, the spinning neutron star left by the explosion, which also powers a small wind nebula inside the shell.