When a star goes supernova, what does it leave behind? NASA hopes to answer that question soon by sending a sounding rocket into space to study the remnants of an ancient supernova.
The supernova in question is Cygnus Loop, which lies in the Cygnus constellation in the Milky Way galaxy, about 1,500 light years from Earth. The Cygnus Loop lies on the edge of a massive supernova that happened nearly 20,000 years ago.
The Off-plane Grating Rocket for Extended Source Spectroscopy (Ogress) mission hopes to use X-rays to get spectral signatures from the Cygnus Loop, which can then be analyzed by scientists to determine what materials lie within it. On May 2, a rocket carrying Ogress will launch for a 15-minute flight in space, giving it five minutes to collect data about the Cygnus Loop.
"Supernovae remnants are rich with astrophysical features," says Randall McEntaffer, principal investigator for Ogress. "We want to show that we can resolve the details of those features — of an extremely large, diffuse object — in high resolution."
Learning about what this supernova left behind could also tell us a lot more about the supernova itself, giving us an indirect way of studying these mysterious stellar explosions that can radiate as much energy as the sun during its entire lifespan. The remnants of a supernova are material ejected from a star when it explodes combined with other material it collects in the aftermath of the explosion's blast.
NASA has bigger plans for Ogress, though. If the first mission proves successful, similar technology can search for matter in space that's much farther away. Although we can sort of measure how much stuff is out there in the universe, we still don't know what the composition of that stuff is. However, technology such as Ogress could tell us.
Scientists hope to use Ogress' technology on a larger telescope with more time in space so we can learn more about the matter that makes up parts of the Universe that are far away.
"Once we know the gratings work well for this astrophysical source, then we can start probing the deep universe," says McEntaffer.
Ogress' first mission, though, remains NASA's priority for the time being. Scientists hope to learn from the mission and improve upon the technology before its second flight in 2016 that will have the sounding rocket observing a star, Capella.
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