Angry Fish

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hub­ble Her­itage Team (STScI/AURA)
Acknowl­edg­ment: Y.-H. Chu and R. M. Williams (UIUC)

To me, this image of what hap­pens after a super­nova blows up, has always looked like a piranha or some sort of angry fish. This image of N 63A from NASA’s Hub­ble Space Tele­scope; that’s what astronomers call it, used to be a huge star, many times big­ger than the sun. Stars like N 63A have vio­lent lives. They live quickly and then explode with force that for a short time they out­shine entire galaxies.

This super­nova left­over exploded and spread its gas and dust into the space around it. This fish is more than 30 light years across. N 63A is located in a galaxy that orbits our Milky Way Galaxy. It is called the Large Mag­el­lanic Cloud and is 160,000 light years away. If you live in the south­ern hemi­sphere you can see this lit­tle galaxy hang­ing in the sky like a cloud. This cloud and another, called the Small Mag­el­lanic Cloud, are named after the explorer Fer­di­nand Mag­el­lan. Mag­el­lan was the first Euro­pean to sail around the world in the 1500s.