Nova remnant

Transcription

When we started working in 3D documentation at the Smithsonian, we weren't expecting to work with the Astrophysical Observatory. With Cassiopeia A, this is our first opportunity to investigate a deep space object in 3 dimensions. Well, Cassiopeia A is the leftover debris from an exploded star. You know, you can kind of think of supernovas as the creative flashes that renew a galaxy. These supernova explosions help distribute our seeds for life. When the stars explode, they disperse what are called heavy elements. That includes oxygen, calcium, iron, all the elements we find necessary for life here on Earth. The ability to take it into the 3rd dimension for the first time is a huge advance, and it helps us understand better our place in the solar system, our place in the galaxy, and our place in the universe. Well, so we were able to create this really interesting 3 dimensional model of Cassiopeia A by first importing the 2 dimensional data, the x and y information that we already had and adding the velocity data. So as a sort of next step, we actually imported that 3D visualization into a commercial software package. And then from there we applied textures that were actually reminiscent of the image-based data to make it feel a little bit more natural like a cosmological object. These things aren't flat. This one in particular is a ball of stuff that's expanding. And how exactly it's expanding is very important. Those details are crucial. The first time I saw this model, it was a revelation. To know that we were seeing sort of around and above and through an exploded star, the remains of an exploded star, an object so far away from us. It was a wow moment for me personally. There's a really deep connection between us as humans and the star stuff that we're made of. Any new technology you have almost invariably opens up new questions and new answers to seek out. And that's what makes science so exciting. And this 3D technology, is really I think just at its infancy about what it can do, not only for astronomy, but for all of science. Kim: It's all about understanding our origins. Those three questions that are, I think, so common that we ask ourselves: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? What could be more exciting than those questions?