NASA captures jaw-dropping scenes of star’s violent death

By Dean Murray

Space scientists have released jaw-dropping scenes capturing a star’s violent death — recorded over more than two and a half decades.

Presented in a spectacular new video from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, it unveils, frame by frame, cosmic wreckage 17,000 light-years from Earth.

The scenes track the furious expansion of Kepler’s Supernova Remnant, the glowing remains of a star first spotted in 1604 by the German astronomer Johannes Kepler.

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Once a white dwarf, the doomed star exploded after pulling in too much material from a companion, triggering a Type Ia supernova — one of the brightest and most powerful events in the cosmos.

Now, using Chandra data from 2000, 2004, 2006, 2014 and 2025, scientists have stitched together the longest time-lapse ever made by the X-ray telescope, revealing how the blast wave continues to tear through the surrounding gas 17,000 light-years from Earth.

The fastest threads of debris are racing through space at nearly 14 million miles per hour — about two percent of the speed of light — while slower material, battering into denser gas, crawls at a mere four million mph. These contrasting speeds help astronomers map the structure of the interstellar medium surrounding the detonation.

“The plot of Kepler’s story is just now beginning to unfold,” said Jessye Gassel of George Mason University, who led the work presented this week at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Phoenix. “It’s remarkable that we can watch, almost in real time, the remains of this shattered star crash into material it flung out centuries ago.”