Hubble views supernova shrapnel

ESA / Hubble & NASA Press Release

15 August 2016 Astronomy Now

DEM L71 is a supernova remnant (α=05h 05.7m, δ=-67° 53' J2000) located about 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a close neighbouring galaxy in the far southern constellation of Dorado (the swordfish). This image captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is just 2.68 x 2.0 arcminutes wide. Click the picture for a larger-scale version. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Y. Chu.
DEM L71 is a supernova remnant (α=05h 05.7m, δ=-67° 53′ J2000) located about 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a close neighbouring galaxy in the far southern constellation of Dorado (the swordfish). This image captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is just 2.68 x 2.0 arcminutes wide. Click the picture for a larger-scale version. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Y. Chu.
Several thousand years ago, a star some 160,000 light-years away from us exploded, scattering stellar shrapnel across the sky. The aftermath of this energetic detonation is shown here in this striking image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).

The exploding star was a white dwarf located in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of our nearest neighbouring galaxies. Around 97 percent of stars within the Milky Way that are between a tenth and eight times the mass of the Sun are expected to end up as white dwarfs. These stars can face a number of different fates, one of which is to explode as supernovae, some of the brightest events ever observed in the universe. If a white dwarf is part of a binary star system, it can siphon material from a close companion. After gobbling up more than it can handle — and swelling to approximately one and a half times the size of the Sun — the star becomes unstable and ignites as a Type Ia supernova.

This was the case for the supernova remnant pictured here, which is known as DEM L71. It formed when a white dwarf reached the end of its life and ripped itself apart, ejecting a superheated cloud of debris in the process. Slamming into the surrounding interstellar gas, this stellar shrapnel gradually diffused into the separate fiery filaments of material seen scattered across this skyscape.

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