The image entitled Splendors and Miseries of a Supergiant wins a Jury award for the 2019 edition of the Acfas “La preuve par l’image” competition.

An image submitted by professors Laurent Drissen (U. Laval) and Nicole St-Louis (U. de Montréal) as well as the doctoral student Marcel Sévigny (U. Laval), all members of the Center for Research in Astrophysics of Quebec (CRAQ), won one of the three NSERC-sponsored Jury awards in the 2019 edition of the “La preuve par l’image” competition of the Association francophone pour le savoir (Acfas).

Splendors and miseries of a supergiant. Crédit: Laurent Drissen, Marcel Sévigny & Nicole St-Louis

The image, etitled Splendors and Miseries of a Supergiant, illustrates a gigantic bubble of gas in which hides a Wolf-Rayet star. On the brink of exploding as a supernova, the latter ejects phenomenal quantities of matter, in the form of a strong stellar wind, that unfold in the surrounding molecular cloud. This Doppler image shows the inexorable expansion of this nebula, referred to as NGC 2359. Light emitted by the ionized hydrogen line have been selected and the colors correspond to the velocities of the gases: blue, moving towards us and red in the opposite direction. The image was extracted from a hyperspectral cube obtained with the SITELLE imaging spectrometer developed in Quebec and installed at the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope. For the purposes of the composition, only the wavelengths associated with the H-alpha line (656 nm) were selected. The CRAQ warmly congratulates the authors for this great success.

About the “La preuve par l’image” competition

“La preuve par l’image” competition, launched by Acfas in 2010, is devoted exclusively to images from scientific research carried out in all fields of knowledge. Again this year, Acfas partnered with the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to open the competition to all Canadian researchers. Winners of the four awards (three jury awards and one public award) were finally announced in the November 11 edition of the TV show Découverte, on French CBC. All the images selected for the 2019 competition can be admired at the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium until the December 8, as part of an exhibition produced jointly with “Espace pour la vie”.

Source and contact:

Professor Laurent Drissen
Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Québec
Université Laval
Laurent.Drissen@phy.ulaval.ca

Professor Nicole St-Louis
Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Québec
Université de Montréal
stlouis@astro.umontreal.ca

Robert Lamontagne
Responsable des relations avec les médias
Centre de recherche en astrophysique du Québec
Université de Montréal
Phone : (438) 795-3482
lamont@astro.umontreal.ca