Watch subtle changes in these morphing images of the universe.
Photo captions by Tim Appenzeller
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Blast From the Past Images by NASA/ESA/Ravi Sankrit and William Blair, Johns Hopkins University
Expanding from a stellar explosion seen 400 years ago by pioneering astronomer Johannes Kepler, a cloud of glowing gas and dust is now 14 light-years across. A composite image combines data from three space telescopes. Spitzer mapped dust heated by the explosion's shock wave (red). The Chandra X-ray Observatory detected the hottest gas in the cloud (blue), just behind the expanding shock wave, along with material from the exploded star itself (green). And the Hubble Space Telescope recorded light from clumps of gas ejected from the star hundreds of thousands of years before the explosion (yellow). The gas was heated to incandescence when the shock wave slammed into it.
