Resembling the puffs of smoke and sparks from a summer fireworks
display in this image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, these
delicate filaments are actually sheets of debris from a stellar
explosion in a neighboring galaxy. Hubble’s target was a supernova
remnant within the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a nearby, small
companion galaxy to the Milky Way visible from the southern
hemisphere.
Denoted N 49, or DEM L 190, this remnant is from a massive star
that died in a supernova blast whose light would have reached
Earth thousands of years ago. This filamentary material will
eventually be recycled into building new generations of stars in
the LMC. Our own Sun and planets are constructed from similar
debris of supernovae that exploded in the Milky Way billions of
years ago.
The Hubble Heritage image of N 49 is a color representation of data
taken in July 2000, with Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.
Image Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowledgment: Y.-H. Chu (UIUC), S. Kulkarni (Caltech) and R.
Rothschild (UCSD)
To see and read more about N 49, please click on:
http://hubblesite.org/news/2003/20
http://heritage.stsci.edu/2003/20
The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is operated by the
Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. (AURA),
for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of
international cooperation between NASA and the European Space
Agency (ESA).
