SN 1572, Tycho's Supernova, Stripes
This illustration explains what scientists believe is occurring in the stripes in the Tycho supernova remnant. The blue, circular region on the left is a schematic representation of the outer shell making up the blast wave of the supernova remnant, with the lighter colored regions being the stripes. The upper panel shows a close-up of a region away from the stripes, where the black lines show tangled magnetic field lines and the red line shows an electron spiraling around one of these lines. Electrons with energies of a trillion electron volts (10^12 eV), corresponding to energies about 7 times lower than the maximum energy reached by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), are responsible for the X-ray emission seen by Chandra. The middle panel shows a close-up of a faint stripe. Here, the magnetic fields are much more tangled and the particle motions are much more turbulent, producing higher energy X-ray emission. In the bright stripe the tangling of the magnetic fields and the turbulence is even higher. The spacing between the stripes corresponds to the radius of the spiraling motion of a proton with an energy over a hundred times larger than the LHC. The path of such a proton is shown in yellow. Very energetic particles like this do not radiate efficiently and cannot be detected with Chandra but are believed to be the origin of the most energetic cosmic rays in our galaxy. Release date March 24, 2011.
Size: 3600px × 2783px
Photo credit: © Photo Researchers / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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