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.
According to a team of astronomers led by Dr. Keith Bannister of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science Division in Australia, invisible noodle- or shell-shaped plasma structures could be floating around in the Milky Way. These structures, which focus and defocus radio waves from distant sources such as quasars, could radically change our ideas about the Galaxy’s interstellar gas.
Using the world’s largest telescopes, researchers have discovered ancient cold gas clouds larger than galaxies in the early universe. The discovery has helped solve a decades-old puzzle on the nature of gas clouds, known as damped Lyman-alpha systems, or DLAs.
With a waxing gibbous Moon setting at 1am BST for the UK on the night of 12-13 August, observers will have dark skies for what could be a Perseid meteor shower to remember. Some theorists believe that Jupiter’s gravitational influence has deflected more particles from parent comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle into Earth’s path for a spectacular show.
