Chandra Release - October 17, 2019

Visual Description: Tycho's Supernova Remnant

This is a Chandra X-ray Observatory image combined with an optical light image of the Tycho's supernova remnant. The image features a large, colorful, and spherical shaped object in the center of a starry background. The object's texture resembles that of small clumpy bubbles or protrusions, with varying shades of blue, purple, and pink spread across its surface on a dark background. The structure of the supernova remnant can be seen clearly in the X-ray data, revealing intricate details with knots and finger-like shapes seemingly coming out of the nebula, and some towards the viewer. There is a bright blue circle around the perimeter from high energy X-rays, which comes from a shell of extremely energetic electrons in the explosion's blast wave. To emphasize the clumps in the image and the three-dimensional nature of Tycho, scientists selected two narrow ranges of X-ray energies to isolate material (silicon, colored red) moving away from Earth, and moving towards us (also silicon, colored blue). The other colors in the image (yellow, green, blue-green, orange and purple) show a broad range of different energies and elements, and a mixture of directions of motion. In this composite image, Chandra's X-ray data have been combined with an optical image of the stars in the same field of view from the Digitized Sky Survey.