Chandra Release - February 15, 2006

Visual Description: Puppis A

The image features a supernova remnant named Puppis A, which is depicted in blue and burnished gold colors.  The X-ray image of Puppis A shows two different views of the supernova remnant. In the upper left, the full field image reveals a bright blue structure.  In the lower right, another view displays a close-up of a small piece of the supernova.  Both structures appear to be shaped like filamentary and wavy gas clouds, with the full structure appearing like an irregular oval and the closeup just a square cutout of the larger oval.   The Chandra image (the close-up) of the region Puppis A reveals a cloud being torn apart by a shock wave produced in a supernova explosion. This is the first X-ray identification of such a process in an advanced phase. In the inset, a blue vertical bar and a blue fuzzy ball or cap to the right show how the cloud has been spread out into an oval-shaped structure that is almost empty in the center. The Chandra data also provides information on the temperature in and around the cloud, with blue representing higher temperature gas.  The bright blue oval wide-angle view is from ROSAT, a German-led X-ray telescope that operated in the 1990s.