juliensimon/supernova-remnants

Green's Supernova Remnant Catalog

Part of the Astronomy Datasets collection on Hugging Face.

Complete catalog of Galactic supernova remnants from Green's SNR Catalog, sourced via NASA HEASARC. Currently 297 SNRs.

Dataset description

Supernova remnants (SNRs) are the expanding shells of gas and dust left behind after a supernova explosion. They are key sources of cosmic rays and play a major role in the chemical enrichment of the interstellar medium. Green's catalog is the standard reference for Galactic SNRs, maintained since 1984.

This dataset includes positions (equatorial and Galactic), angular sizes, morphological type, 1 GHz radio flux density, and radio spectral index for each remnant.

Supernova remnants are among the most important objects in astrophysics. Their expanding blast waves are widely believed to be the primary accelerators of Galactic cosmic rays up to the "knee" of the cosmic ray spectrum (~3 PeV), a hypothesis supported by detections of TeV gamma-ray and non-thermal X-ray emission from young SNR shells. The three morphological types in Green's catalog -- shell, filled-centre (plerion), and composite -- reflect distinct physical configurations: shell-type remnants are dominated by the forward shock sweeping up the interstellar medium, filled-centre remnants are powered by a central pulsar wind nebula, and composites exhibit both features.

The radio spectral index is a key diagnostic: shell-type SNRs typically show spectral indices around -0.5 (consistent with diffusive shock acceleration of electrons in the Sedov-Taylor phase), while filled-centre remnants powered by pulsar winds tend to have flatter spectra (-0.0 to -0.3). The 1 GHz flux density, combined with distance estimates from HI absorption or association with molecular clouds, constrains the total radio luminosity and energy budget of each remnant. Green's catalog, continuously maintained since 1984 and updated through careful literature review, remains the definitive census of the ~300 known Galactic SNRs -- a number thought to represent only a fraction of the true population, with many remnants hidden behind dense Galactic dust or too old and faint to detect at radio wavelengths.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
name	string	SNR designation (Galactic coordinates, e.g. "G001.0-00.1")
alt_names	string	Alternative/common names (e.g. "Cas A", "Crab Nebula")
ra	float	Right ascension (degrees)
dec	float	Declination (degrees)
lii	float	Galactic longitude (degrees)
bii	float	Galactic latitude (degrees)
major_diameter	float	Angular size major axis (arcmin)
minor_diameter	float	Angular size minor axis (arcmin)
type	string	Morphological type code (S, F, C, ?)
flux_1_ghz	float	Radio flux density at 1 GHz (Jy)
spectral_index	float	Radio spectral index
snr_type_name	string	Full type name: shell, filled-centre, composite, uncertain

Quick stats

• 297 supernova remnants
• 234 shell, 9 filled-centre, 37 composite

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/supernova-remnants", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()

# SNRs by type
print(df["snr_type_name"].value_counts())

# Brightest SNRs at 1 GHz
top = df.nlargest(10, "flux_1_ghz")[["name", "alt_names", "flux_1_ghz"]]

# Sky distribution in Galactic coordinates
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.scatter(df["lii"], df["bii"], s=5)
plt.xlabel("Galactic longitude (deg)")
plt.ylabel("Galactic latitude (deg)")
plt.title("Galactic SNR Distribution")

Data source

All data comes from Green's SNR Catalog hosted by NASA's High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), accessed via the TAP protocol.

Update schedule

Quarterly (1st Monday of January, April, July, October at 19:00 UTC) via GitHub Actions.

Related datasets

• gamma-ray-bursts — Fermi GBM GRB Catalog
• gravitational-waves — LIGO/Virgo detections
• exoplanets — NASA Exoplanet Archive

Pipeline

Source code: juliensimon/space-datasets

Support

If you find this dataset useful, please give it a ❤️ on the dataset page and share feedback in the Community tab! Also consider giving a ⭐️ to the space-datasets repo.

Citation

@dataset{supernova_remnants,
  author = {Simon, Julien},
  title = {Green's Supernova Remnant Catalog},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/supernova-remnants},
  note = {Based on Green's SNR Catalog via NASA HEASARC}
}

License

CC-BY-4.0