Supernova remnant DEM L316A lies in the Large Magellanic Cloud some 160,000 light-years away in the far southern constellation of Dorado. Image credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, Y. Chu.This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image captures the remnants of a long-dead star. These rippling wisps of ionised gas, named DEM L316A, are located some 160,000 light-years away within one of the Milky Way’s closest galactic neighbours — the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC).
The explosion that formed DEM L316A was an example of an especially energetic and bright variety of supernova, known as a Type Ia. Such supernova events are thought to occur when a white dwarf star steals more material than it can handle from a nearby companion, and becomes unbalanced. The result is a spectacular release of energy in the form of a bright, violent explosion, which ejects the star’s outer layers into the surrounding space at immense speeds. As this expelled gas travels through the interstellar material, it heats it up and ionises it, producing the faint glow that Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 captured above.An image of the Large Magellanic Cloud captured with a DSLR and 85mm f/1.4 lens from New Zealand on 10 December 2015. Image credit: Ade Ashford.The LMC orbits the Milky Way as a satellite galaxy and is the fourth largest in our group of galaxies, the Local Group. DEM L316A is not alone in the LMC; Hubble came across another one in 2010 with SNR 0509, and in 2013 it snapped SNR 0519.
This image of the spiral galaxy NGC 3274 comes courtesy of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Hubble’s WFC3 vision spreads from the ultraviolet light through to the near infrared, allowing astronomers to study a wide range of targets, from nearby star formation through to galaxies in the most remote regions of the cosmos.
Astronomers at the University of Exeter have found helium in the atmosphere of a Jupiter-class exoplanet – a first – and sodium in the atmosphere of another, an indicator of a cloud-free sky.
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals NGC 1222, a galaxy with a rather eventful story to tell. NGC 1222 has been described as a peculiar example of a so-called lenticular galaxy, but one that exhibits very recent star formation on a huge scale — an event known as a starburst — due to having recently consumed two dwarf galaxies.
