juliensimon/supernova-remnants

Green's Supernova Remnant Catalog

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.

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

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