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 extraordinary bubble, glowing like the ghost of a star in the haunting darkness of space, may appear supernatural and mysterious, but it is a familiar astronomical object: a planetary nebula, the remnants of a dying star. This is the best view of the little-known object ESO 378-1 yet obtained and was captured by ESO’s Very Large Telescope in northern Chile.
This Hubble Space Telescope image shows globular cluster NGC 1783 in the Southern Hemisphere constellation of Dorado. NGC 1783 lies within the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, some 160,000 light-years from Earth. NGC 1783 is thought to be less than 1.5 billion years old — very young for a globular cluster.
Tangled clouds of gas from a destroyed star can be seen weaving their way through space in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the remnants of a Type 1a supernova that consumed a white dwarf in a once glorious blaze of light. Such supernovae are critical to measuring cosmic distances.
