Supernova remnant

There are two common routes to a supernova: either a massive star may run out of fuel, ceasing to generate fusion energy in its core, and collapsing inward under the force of its own gravity to form a neutron star or a black hole; or a white dwarf star may accrete material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and undergoes a carbon detonation.

In either case, the resulting supernova explosion expels much or all of the stellar material with velocities as much as 10% the speed of light (or approximately 30,000 km/s) and a strong shock wave forms ahead of the ejecta that heats the upstream plasma up to temperatures well above millions of K. The shock continuously slows as it sweeps up the ambient medium, but it can expand over hundreds or thousands of years and tens of parsecs before its speed falls below the local sound speed.

One of the best-observed young supernova remnants was formed by SN 1987A, a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud observed in February 1987. Other well-known supernova remnants include the Crab Nebula; Tycho, the remnant of SN 1572, named after Tycho Brahe, who recorded the brightness of its original explosion; and Kepler, the remnant of SN 1604, named after Johannes Kepler. The youngest known remnant in the Milky Way is G1.9+0.3, discovered in the Galactic Center.

Stages

An SNR passes through the following stages as it expands:

1. Free expansion of the ejecta, until they sweep up their own weight in circumstellar or interstellar medium. This can last tens to a few hundred years, depending on the density of the surrounding gas.
2. Sweeping up of a shell of shocked circumstellar and interstellar gas. This begins the Sedov-Taylor phase, which can be well modeled by a self-similar analytic solution (see Taylor–von Neumann–Sedov blast wave). Strong X-ray emission traces the strong shock waves and hot shocked gas.
3. Cooling of the shell, to form a thin (< 1 pc), dense (1 to 100 million atoms per cubic metre) shell surrounding the hot (a few million kelvin) interior. This is the pressure-driven snowplow phase. The shell can be clearly seen in optical emission from recombining ionized hydrogen and ionized oxygen atoms.
4. Cooling of the interior. The dense shell continues to expand from its own momentum. This stage is best seen in the radio emission from neutral hydrogen atoms.
5. Merging with the surrounding interstellar medium. When the supernova remnant slows to the speed of the random velocities in the surrounding medium, after roughly 30,000 years, it will merge into the general turbulent flow, contributing its remaining kinetic energy to the turbulence.