Supernova Remnants (SNR's)

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, mixing with the interstellar matter which is "swept up" when the shell expands, and is a domain of an extreme kind of physics. These nebulae are called supernova remnants (SNRs). Depending on the type of the supernova, there may also be a central compact remnant in the form of a neutron star.

According to current theory, two different mechanisms produce supernovae: First, stars considerably more massive than our Sun can most probably not evolve quitely into an end state as a white dwarf. When coming to age, these massive stars explode in a most violent detonation which flashes up at a luminosity of up to 10 billion times that of the sun, called supernova (of type II), and ejecting the very greatest part of the stellar matter in a violently expanding shell. Aternatively, infalling matter on a white dwarf star can cause it to explode as a supernova of type I.

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). They coined the term "Super-Novae" in 1934.

Interesting resources on supernova remnants:

D.A. Green's Catalogue of Galactic Supernova Remnants (July 1995 version), Mullard Observatory, Cambridge, UK ( Crab nebula M1 data from this catalog)
Einstein Satellite images of SNRs (Fred Seward, Harvard)
SNORE: Supernova Remnants Group at Harvard
Pat Slane's SNR page
SNR page at HEASARC (GSFC/Nasa)
SNR page at NRL (N.E. Kasim, K.W. Weiler)
SNR Catalogs List
ARVAL Catalog of Bright Nebulae (including SNRs)
Look at Supernova Remnants in Messier's Catalog
Look at some significant non-Messier SNRs

Supernova resources:

The Supernova Pages List by Marcos J. Montes
International Supernova Network
Lists of Recent and all supernovae detected (CfA/Harvard); Asagio supenova list
Supernovae in NGC and IC galaxies
Supernovae in Messier Galaxies - Messier Galaxies and their Supernovae
Supernova Radio Observation page (NRL, K.W. Weiler)
Wayne P. Johnson's introduction to supernovae
Supernova Types (by Mike Richmond)
Images from some supernovae, collected by Greg Bothun at the University of Oregon

References:

Baade, Walter and Zwicky, Fritz, 1934. On Super-Novae. Proc. N.A.S., Vol. 20, No. 5 (May 15, 1934), p. 254-259.

Diffuse Nebulae

Planetary Nebulae

Dark Nebulae

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

Last Modification: 25 Jan 1998, 16:25 MET