Supernova Remnants (SNR's)

[M SNR] Click to go to the only supernova remnant in Messier's catalog, the first object, the Crab Nebula M1. M1 is also shown in the icon.
When a star explodes in a supernova explosion, it depends on its type what exactly remains. But anyway, the offbursted gaseous remainders will form a rapidly expanding and slowly fading cloud, a domain of an extreme kind of physics. Depending on the type of the supernova, there may be a central remnant in the form of a neutron star.

Although the Crab nebula is the only Messier SNR, and one of few historical supernovae observed in our Milky Way galaxy, other supernovae have appeared in Messier galaxies (see our table), and produced SNRs. These special kind of nebulae can be observed in some cases, e.g. the remnant of the Supernova 1993J in M81.

The knowledge of the nature of the supernova phenomenon, and the name "supernova", goes back to Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky, who studied Novae in the early 1930s at Mt. Wilson Observatory. They were especially interested, and successful, in finding extremely bright "novae" in other galaxies, comparable to the one which had been observed in the Andromeda Galaxy M31 in 1885 (S Andromedae).

Interesting resources on supernova remnants: Supernova resources:
Diffuse Nebulae

Planetary Nebulae

Dark Nebulae

Hartmut Frommert (spider@seds.org)
Christine Kronberg (smil@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)

[Nebula] [SEDS] [MAA] [Home] [Indexes]

Last Modification: 25 Jan 1998, 16:25 MET