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Eerie Image Shows Spectacular Aftermath of a Large Star’s Death

An undated image shows a view of the orange and pink clouds that make up what remains after the explosive death of a massive star - the Vela supernova remnant. (ESO/VPHAS+ team/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit/Handout via Reuters)
An undated image shows a view of the orange and pink clouds that make up what remains after the explosive death of a massive star - the Vela supernova remnant. (ESO/VPHAS+ team/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit/Handout via Reuters)
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Eerie Image Shows Spectacular Aftermath of a Large Star’s Death

An undated image shows a view of the orange and pink clouds that make up what remains after the explosive death of a massive star - the Vela supernova remnant. (ESO/VPHAS+ team/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit/Handout via Reuters)
An undated image shows a view of the orange and pink clouds that make up what remains after the explosive death of a massive star - the Vela supernova remnant. (ESO/VPHAS+ team/Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit/Handout via Reuters)

The aftermath of a large star's explosive death is seen in an image released on Monday by the European Southern Observatory, showing immense filaments of brightly shining gas that was blasted into space during the supernova.

Before exploding at the end of its life cycle, the star is believed to have had a mass at least eight times greater than our sun. It was located in our Milky Way galaxy about 800 light years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Vela. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).

The eerie image shows clouds of gas that look like pink and orange tendrils in the filters used by the astronomers, covering an expanse roughly 600 times larger than our solar system.

"The filamentary structure is the gas that was ejected from the supernova explosion, which created this nebula. We see the inside material of a star as it expands into space. When there are denser parts, some of the supernova material shocks with the surrounding gas and creates some of the filamentary structure," said Bruno Leibundgut, an astronomer affiliated with the European Southern Observatory (ESO).

The image shows the supernova remnants about 11,000 years after the explosion, Leibundgut said.

"Most of the material that shines is due to hydrogen atoms that are excited. The beauty of such images is that we can directly see what material was inside a star," Leibundgut added.

"The material that has been built up over many millions of years is now exposed and will cool down over millions of years until it eventually will form new stars. These supernovae produce many elements - calcium or iron - which we carry in our own bodies. This is a spectacular part of the path in the evolution of stars."

The star itself has been reduced in the aftermath of the supernova to an incredibly dense spinning object called a pulsar. A pulsar is a type of neutron star - one of the most compact celestial objects known to exist. This one rotates 10 times per second.

The image represented a mosaic of observations taken with a wide-field camera called OmegaCAM at the VLT Survey Telescope, hosted at the ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. The data for the image was collected from 2013 to 2016, the ESO said.

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Varieties

Nigerian Farms Battle Traffic, Developers in Downtown Abuja

Developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in Abuja. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP
Developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in Abuja. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP
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Nigerian Farms Battle Traffic, Developers in Downtown Abuja

Developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in Abuja. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP
Developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in Abuja. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP

Under the din of traffic from the highway bridge that cuts over his fields, Bala Haruna inspects corn, cassava and okra on his family farm.

A pump pulls up water from a nearby stream and is diverted through trenches dug through cropland wedged between four-lane roads -- fields which were here long before the nearby hotel, the imposing national mosque or any of the high-rises that make up downtown Abuja were even dreamed up.

"There were no buildings here," Haruna, 42, told AFP, reminiscing over his childhood as birds chirped and frogs croaked.

The urban farms dotting Nigeria's capital show the limits of the top-down management the planned city is known for -- oases scattered around pockmarked downtown that has long expanded outward faster than it has filled in.

They owe much of their existence to the fact that they lie in hard-to-develop gulches along creek beds. Even roads built through them over the years tended to be elevated highway overpasses.

That fragile balancing act, however, is increasingly under threat, as developers fill in farmland despite regulations protecting these areas as rare green spaces in a city known for concrete sprawl.

On the other side of the overpass, the future has arrived: the vegetation abruptly stops and temperatures suddenly rise over flattened fields razed by construction crews.

Local farmers said the people who took the land three years ago provided no documentation and only gave the eight of them 300,000 naira to split -- a sum worth only $190 today after years of rampant inflation.

Much of the farmland in and around downtown is supposed to be a municipal green space, with neither farms nor buildings on it.

But enforcement of the decades-old Abuja master plan is ripe with abuse and lack of enforcement, said Ismail Nuhu, urban governance researcher who did his PhD on the capital's urban planning.

Adding to the sense of precarity is that the land, on paper, belongs to the government.

"Politicians still use it to grab lands, just to say, 'Oh, according to the master plan, this is not to be here'," no matter what the document actually says, he told AFP, adding that, technically, even the presidential villa is not located where it is supposed to be.

Nyesom Wike, the minister of the Federal Capital Territory, which includes Abuja, recently told reporters he would "enforce" the 70s-era master plan by building roads and compensating and evicting settlements that stand in the way.

FCT officials including Wike's spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.

Urbanizing country, not enough jobs

The farms have provided steady employment -- a lifeline for some as the rapidly urbanizing country fails to produce enough jobs. A recent opening for 10,000 government jobs saw 450,000 applicants, according to local media.

"Having a green space... in a very thick, populated city like Abuja does a lot of good," said retiree Malik Kuje Guni, who started farming three years ago to supplement his pension.

While tens of thousands of residents pass by the farms each day without second thought, Guni, when he was working as a civil servant, would often come down to visit, enjoying the shade and fresh air.

Now tilling a potato plot of his own, "I can come down, work, sweat," the 63-year-old said. "I have hope something will come out of it."

A few blocks over, squat, informal houses made of wood and sheet metal give way to a field of sugarcane, corn and banana trees. Glass-paneled highrises, half-finished construction and the imposing Bank of Industry tower above.

The crops give way to land cleared by developers a few months ago, some of whom pushed into Godwin Iwok's field and destroyed his banana trees.

Iwok, who quit his security job 22 years ago to make more money as a farmer, has had parts of his fields destroyed twice in the past two years, neither time with compensation.

To Guni, the farms represent the city's rural heritage. Despite decades of government promises to relocate Nigeria's capital from the crowded, congested mega-city of Lagos, the move only occurred in 1991.

But neither Iwok, 65, nor Haruna want their children to continue their increasingly precarious line of work.

"I wouldn't want my children to stand under the sun as I did," Iwok told AFP.

"I only use what I'm getting here... to make sure my children go to school."