NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration

For release: 10-14-03
Photo release #: 03-184

Massive stars lead short, spectacular lives

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Composite Chandra X-ray and optical image of M86 (NGC 4406)

Live fast, blow hard and die young: Composite Chandra X-ray and optical image of the massive star HD 192163

Massive stars lead short, spectacular lives. This composite image — X-ray shown in blue and optical shown in red and green — reveals dramatic details of a portion of the Crescent Nebula, a giant gaseous shell of gas created by powerful winds blowing from the massive star HD 192163.

After only 4.5 million years, one-thousandth the age of the Sun, HD 192163 began its headlong rush toward a supernova catastrophe. First it expanded enormously to become a red giant and ejected its outer layers at about 20,000 miles per hour. Two hundred thousand years later — a blink of the eye in the life of a normal star — the intense radiation from the exposed hot, inner layer of the star began pushing gas away at speeds in excess of 3 million miles per hour!

When this high speed "stellar wind" rammed into the slower red giant wind, a dense shell was formed. In the image, a portion of the shell is shown in red. The force of the collision created two shock waves: one that moved outward from the dense shell to create the green filamentary structure, and one that moved inward to produce a bubble of million degree Celsius X-ray emitting gas, shown in blue, in an image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The brightest X-ray emission is near the densest part of the compressed shell of gas, indicating that the hot gas is evaporating matter from the shell.

HD 192163 will likely explode as a supernova in about a hundred thousand years. This image enables astronomers to determine the mass, energy, and composition of the gaseous shell around this pre-supernova star. An understanding of such environments provides important data for interpreting observations of supernovas and their remnants.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program. (X-ray: NASA/UIUC/Y. Chu & R. Gruendel; Optical: SDSU/MLO/Y. Chu et al.)

Contact Steve Roy Media Relations Dept. (256) 544-0034 Megan Watzke Chandra X-ray Obs. Center (617) 496-7998

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