Cassiopeia A (Cas A) is a prime example of beauty paired with absolute destruction. We call Cassiopeia a supernova remnant in astronomy. It’s located 11,000 light-years away from Earth in our very own Milky Way. However, that isn’t the most fascinating part about Cassiopeia A. What’s amazing is you’re looking at exactly the process of what breaths life into new stars and planets. It’s the threads of life that keeps the universe interesting and giving it a way of knowing itself. The colors that you see in the photo above are not for show. Each color represents an element. In fact, when you look at what common things are made from like the iron that’s in a cast iron pan or the silicon that is used to make glass. Those elements weren’t always on Earth. They came from supernova remnants like Cassiopeia A that disperse them at unfathomable speeds....

About 7,000 light years away from Earth lies the aftermath of a massive star that went supernova. In its wake we see gorgeous wispy interstellar gases spreading out in a non-uniform manner. The way this happened is a massive star (at least 8 times larger than our Sun) went through stellar death process (where it exhausts all its hydrogen and works its way through heavier elements like helium>carbon>oxygen etc.) and eventually the star’s core collapsed when it lost stability. This resulted in one of the most spectacular explosions in the universe – a supernova. (Want more details on how supernovae happen? Read my article here).     As the supernova remnant expands into its surroundings it shocks filaments of oxygen atoms (glowing green-blue). What’s even more fascinating is that the span of this supernova is 60 light years across (About 600 trillion km...

Supernovas are probably one of the coolest events that happen in our universe. It’s just amazing of the sheer amount of energy these death machines put out. I came across a famous supernova called Supernova 1987A. As I researched the story behind it I gained a lot of appreciation for supernovas and how incredibly hard it is to catch one in the act. Before I move on to the story let me just give you an overview of what a supernova is exactly. Well a supernova depends on a few factors first actually. One of them being the size of the star. Our own Sun for example will not go supernova at the end of it’s life (you have around 5 billion years or so until that happens) because the size of it is too small. A star would have to be several times the size of that to actually go supernova. There are also two types of ways a star can go supernova: Type I – a star accumulates...