Chandra Release - May 24, 2010

Visual Description: N49

A beautiful X-ray and optical image of the supernova remnant N49 is shown. The image features a bright blue, pale yellow and white glowing object in the center, sprinkled by stars.  The structure of the image is like a flattened, softened diamond shape. A long observation from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, colored in blue, reveals evidence for a small bullet-shaped object being blown out of a debris field left over from an exploded star. This bullet, a blue blob, is in the bottom far right hand corner of the image and is rich in silicon, sulphur and neon. The detection of this bullet shows that the explosion that destroyed the star was highly asymmetric.

The bullet is traveling at a high speed of about 5 million miles an hour away from a bright point source in the upper left part of N49. This bright source may be a so-called soft gamma ray repeater a source that emits bursts of gamma rays and X-rays.