1999/06/01 by William P. Blair, Ravi Sankrit, John C. Raymond +2 · 65 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Galaxy #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Hubble space telescope #Physics #Proper motion #Protein filament #Stars #Supernova #Supernova remnant #Wide Field Camera 3 #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/300994
published in The Astronomical Journal 118(2), 942-947 (Institute of Physics) · 18 pages, 3 Figures (2 JPEG and one Postscript)
arxiv created 1999/06/01 · openalex publication_date 1999/08/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We present a Hubble Space Telescope ( HST ) Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 narrowband Hα image of a region on the northeastern limb of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant. This location provides a detailed example of where the primary blast wave first encounters the surrounding interstellar medium. The filament structure is seen in exquisite detail in this image, which was obtained primarily as an EARLY ACQuisition image for a follow-up spectroscopic program. We compare the HST image with a digitized version of the POSS-I red plate to measure the proper motion of this filament. By combining this value for the proper motion with previous measurements of the shock velocity at this position we find that the distance to the Cygnus Loop is 440 -100 +130 pc, considerably smaller than the canonical value of 770 pc. We briefly discuss the ramifications of this new distance estimate for our understanding of this prototypical supernova remnant.